On the fourteenth day of Christmas ...

our lovely friends came to play.

By virtue of some alphabetical wiztrickery, H and A were lab partners at university, realised they'd spotted each other before at church, and we've all been the best of friends ever since.  We count A as family, particularly now that he is Kitty's godfather, which mostly means that I don't sweat the tidying up if he's coming over. 

His better half, L, has an appreciation for the merits of Persephone books, salted caramel almonds from Hotel Chocolat and all things handmade, so we were always going to hit it off.

They came to spend a quiet cosy Sunday with us; a big roast gammon and sticky toffee pudding lunch, followed by Christmas presents, and an afternoon tucked up in my quilt collections, playing Sonic, eating sweeties, reading, knitting and playing shop with Kitty.  It was restful, fun and quintessentially English; if only we had a roaring fire and it had been snowing outside we would have been quite the picture postcard (well minus the computer games perhaps).

But you didn't really want to know about all that (and apologies to anyone whose New Year's virtuosity is wavering because I mentioned sticky toffee pudding (with ice-cream)).  Sunday was the unveiling of the final handmade Christmas presents for 2011.

First, there was a large, flat, square, squishy parcel for A, which Kitty assiduously helped him to unwrap.

A 'very useful quilt for snuggling under on cold winter's days when part of your house has a stone floor'

The pattern is Pandora's Box from the Jelly Roll Quilts book by Pam and Nicky Lintott, and the fabric is a Moda jelly roll that I bought from my very first Festival of Quilts.  It perfectly fulfils the criteria of 'colours that I have seen A wear' and in fact he turned up in a jumper that perfectly matched the orange border.

It's a really great pattern for jelly rolls and just generally; it's nice and simple to show of the fabric to its best advantage and as it's all mixed up together, the quilt doesn't suffer for the quilter not being able to separate the jelly roll neatly into light and dark.

It also lent itself to a piecemeal construction.  On one evening I took the jelly roll apart and did the first stage of cutting, another night I matched the strips into pairs for the centre sections, sewed them together during one nap time, and cut the second stage during another.  At the end of each stage, all the pieces could be tucked away from tiny fingers in a bag without loosing my place, or upsetting a precisely piled stack of cut pieces.

Once I'd sewn up the main quilt top I stood back and marvelled at the centre points of the blocks; my quilting has improved so gradually through little bits of practice here and there I forget that I can be pretty accurate now if I take my time to do it properly.

The border is a flaming orange and gold weave; it doesn't feel like a printed quilting cotton but is much softer with more drape.  There was just enough on the bolt at Quilter's Den for the borders or I would have been tempted to have a little bit more for a skirt in one of my favourite colours. 

I had enough white on lime green polka dots left over from my sampler quilt for the binding, so all that was left was to choose the backing, and what a backing:

Enough sunshine to chase away any rainy day gloom (also from Quilter's Den).  I really ought to pay more attention to the names of the fabric I'm buying I know.

I used a pure cotton wadding and quilted it all over with lime green thread in a square stipple.


I can't imagine life without my quilts, they have so many uses from extra blankets on cold nights to tents in the lounge and space to lie out in the garden in the heat of summer so I'm glad A and L like their very own.

And just in case he doesn't share -

L has a pair of handknit socks.  It's Regia (definitely Regia this time - I found the ball band) Circus Colour in Akrobatik, bought on my last trip to Liberty's.  L once borrowed a pair of my shoes on an impromptu muddy walk so I knit to fit me, using a 64st cast on and a slip stitch heel and I think they should keep her feet nice and warm walking around the stone floor of their kitchen on chilly mornings.

So there we have it; four pairs of socks, two quilts, a hat, a scarf and a jumper.  Not a bad turn out considering that I didn't start until mid-October.  Maybe this will be the year that I start a bit earlier (yes yes, I can hear your hollow laughter from here!). But first I have two new balls of Rowan Big Wool in a delicious deep pomegranate to go and squoosh.

Kittee

The twelve days of Christmas may have ended, and the trees, lights, baubles and tinsel have been taken down and packed away and I can now confirm (with pictures) that I did finish the Christmas knitting before the end of Christmas.

The one lone little piece of knitted present that still trailed yarn and needles was a jumper for Kitty, the Immie tee by Quince & Co, knit from Sparkleduck Galaxy in a deep midnight blue with silver sparkles.  I'd just about finished the body and started a sleeve when I gave it up in favour of a relaxed Christmas Eve with my family, and sure enough it was there waiting for me to do a few little rounds on Christmas afternoon as we curled up by our tree to watch the last of the daylight dance with shadows across the room.

I packed it to take north after the end of the profiterole marathon, and knit as we trundled painstakingly up the motorway one day, and across on another motorway the next to stay with H's parents for a couple of nights.

I finished it one afternoon, sat in the family room as my parents-in-law enjoyed having all of their chicks and a couple of cuckoos around them, and owing to an incident involving lasagne for supper, cheese, grated cheese and a little more cheese, it was pressed into service straight away to visit Great-Gran to take tea.

Taking tea with Gran is somewhat of a ritual.  Regardless of the time of day, or the proximity of any of the major meals you have to sit down at the kitchen table and have a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

For almost 13 years, H has drunk my cup of tea, and I have eaten his Ferraro Roche.  That is the way that it is at Gran's.  It's even more special now that Kitty's grown enough to have a big girl chair and a little Madeira cake, just as H did many many years ago.

It also helps that Gran's poodle Sasha doesn't mind helping to clear up after little girls!

Kitty played with her auntie

and had cuddles from a great-auntie who popped by


and it wasn't until we'd come back down home that I had the time or the resources to properly wash and block her latest knit.

But at last, a proper unveiling:

Jumper: Immie tee with long sleeves
Trousers: pink and purple stripes from the JoJo Maman Bebe sale
Accessories: Room on the Broom - model's own, Gruffalo socks from Little Sunflowers

It grew a little with blocking but with incredible growing not-so-tiny wee girls that's not necessarily a bad thing and I'm happy that if it's a bit big now, it will be a perfect fit before too long.

Clearly I've made one very obvious change to the pattern, I accidentally used a 3.5mm needle rather than a 3.25 and it grew sleeves! Well, ok, I did use slightly larger needles and didn't notice until I double checked them in preparation for the sleeves but I like the drape of the resultant fabric and I wasn't going to re-knit the whole body.  She's wearing it here as a t-shirt layer over a long sleeved vest which works well, although it also works well as a more traditional jumper; in the pictures at Great-Gran's she's got a thick penguin t-shirt and a vest underneath.

The original pattern has cute little cap sleeves but full length sleeves are a rather necessary ingredient for a Christmas jumper in England, even in this unseasonably mild winter, and I had plenty of yarn so I invented them.

This is the largest size, and the pattern would have you cast on 57 stitches and work a few rows of garter before joining it to the body.  I cast on two-third of the stitches (38), joined them in the round and worked in garter stitch for the suggested rounds, then increased up to 57 sts in the next row and worked straight until they seemed about long enough (70 rounds). 

A Handmade Christmas Part 3: for the Mummies

Every now and then I come across a really beautiful knitting pattern, crafted from what can only be Rumplestiltskin's gold, or something else luscious looking but equally unavailable, and I sigh, and cruise the internets and Ravelry to work out a substitution, or how to not eat for a month to afford the shipping.

So when it turns out that the yarn in question is in fact a nice little Rowan, available from all number of places including a shop five hundred yards from my office; well, it seems only right and proper to knit it up right away to encourage the knitting muses to foster more such synchronicity.

I saw the Drifted Pearls scarf on Pinterest in a gentle grey, and when I saw it called for Rowan Lima, I knew I had Mum's Christmas present-to-be.  It's knit as a traditional scarf with a loopy bobbly edging until you get a little over half the length you might want in an ordinary scarf, then the fabric is pleated, and the pleats securely knit into a loop.  Tuck the end through the loop and you have a gorgeous warm wide scarf, perfect for Mum who tends to wear her ordinary scarves this way.

(Photo shamelessly stolen from Mum)

The Amazon blue matches the hat that I made for her last Christmas, and I hope they are both keeping her warm in the wild winds that are currently howling at our windows as they whip around the house.

Further north, lots further north, is another cozy Mum.  We have a simple formula for H's Mum's Christmas gifts: fruit jellies (the good ones made with actual fruit juice) + handknit socks = happiness.

And when you know the recipient likes your knitting so much she wears holes in the heels on a regular basis, you can't but pick up the needles:

Edwardian Boating socks, knit from an Opal blank that I hand-dyed with Kool-Aid.  With a linen stitch heel and a sock yarn with a 25% nylon content I'm hoping not to see these in the mending pile for many years to come, and to be honest they may fall into the 'oh darn' over the bin pile as I'm not sure I could work out how to reknit linen stitch without dropping almost all of the stitches.

It's an addictive pattern though; I'd always want to knit to the next waterboatman, and the next and the next, until I had two socks sat in front of me.  I'm glad I didn't knit them for me though as the linen stitch is not very stretchy and I would never have got them over my ankles.  I know if I really wanted them for me I could change the heel flap to a simple rib, but it was nice to knit them as they were designed.

That's almost all of the Christmas craftiness out in the open; the last little bit is still wrapped up under our tree, but before I'm truly caught up I've still got to tell you about the Christmas Croquembouche and my brother-in-law's amazing ultra-slow roasted beef.  That'll have to wait for another day though as it's late, and after an evening spent chasing electricity with a hairdryer when we got home from work to discover that none of the plugs were working, I'm off to make a nest in which to hide from the storm with a couple of quilts, a knitted blanket and as much of the duvet as I can persuade H to part with.

A Handmade Christmas Part 2: Woolies for H

It's said that every one of us has a love language, a way of expressing affection and feeling cherished that trumps all the others.  I am a Knitter and (for want of a better word) a creativist, and my love language won't be found on any list or in any bestseller; it's Handmade (subsection Wool).

If Kitty was predestined to be snuggled in cosy handknits and handsewns from the moment of her birth, how much more yarn should be heaped upon my H; the man who puts up with my (many) foibles, has loved and supported me unwaveringly throughout some of the hardest and darkest days of my life, and who did the entire Christmas washing up single handed on Boxing Day morning while Kitty and I had a mid-morning nap.

It's really no surprise then that the Christmas knitting that I was prepared to bust bedtimes for should now belong to H.

 

First, the Christmas hat. From a quick count in the hat cupboard this is the fifth Christmas hat, and I'm told it's the best to date.  The pattern is the Irish Moss Toque by Alexandra Charlotte Defoe, and the yarn is Rowan Felted Tweed Aran in the wonderfully named Storm Blue. 

It's a really fun pattern to knit; the cables are interesting but logical so you don't have to refer back to the pattern every thirty seconds, and in an aran weight yarn you progress pretty quickly.  It is worth noting that the called for yarn is sold in 100g skeins so when they say you need 2 skeins, and the yardage suggests that you need four balls of something in a 50g put up, you might not need all of the second skein; I used two and a half balls and this is a big hat with a really deep turn up.  I would also recommend a circular needle rather than DPNs, even if you have to pull a loop to make it work, my standard length DPNs were just too short to keep all the stitches safely on three needles.

The yarn itself is slubby and tweedy with a bit of a crunch, enough to keep you nice and warm without being too scratchy on a bare forehead.  It would make fabulous jumper yarn for a cabley aran. 


I started it in the early hours of a dark Wednesday in the departure lounge of Birmingham airport, and knit the ribbing as we bounced and bumped our way through turbulence to Glasgow, and finished it late into a quiet evening a few days before Christmas, having chivied H into an early bedtime (and run him a bath).

It suits him, it fits him, and two hat-testing missions to our windy local playgroup says it keeps him warm.

Moving from a warm head to cosy toes, I gave him a pair of handspun Christmas socks:

They started out life in our house as a braid of fluffy Falkland from Spindlefrog at Wonderwool a long time ago (2009?) in the Bogdust colourway.

I spun the whole braid as a fine continuous ply and then Navajo plied it (or my approximation thereof) to preserve the flashes of neon colour in an otherwise muted green/brown yarn.  I love how it turned out but were I to do it again I think that dividing the braid lengthways into three or four and then spinning each one end to end would result in shorter stripes across the entire sock, rather than the off/on effect here.  It would be fun to try anyway.


The Falkland is soft and fluffy, although I'm not sure how hardy it will turn out to be.  Still, socks are made to be loved and worn, and as you can see from the slightly Nora Batty-esque baggyness around the ankles, these made it to feet before photographs.

And finally, a pair of socks from Father Christmas, supplied to his elves by a convoluted system of packaging and posting made known to parents everywhere during ante-natal classes. (You thought they taught us how to look after the baby? Alas no, it's Santa's Secrets for Beginners followed by Embarrasing Your Teenager 101)


You're going to have to trust me when I tell you that this is a pair of socks.  Or at least, on Christmas Day when H unpacked his stocking and immediately put them on his feet there were two.  The laundry basket contains only one.  Ergo, one of them is somewhere in our house.  H does not know precisely where but mentioned something about a bed/sofa/other furniture and the word 'under'.  It bodes well for our marriage that my love language is not the accurate placement of laundry.

It's a Regia sock yarn from the back of the stash [ETA - it's actually Fortissima Colori Socka Color No 2405 - thanks Diane!], and I think even when I bought it it was in the discontinued and discounted bin.  The yarn in the ball looks like the toe and heel sections so the rest was a bit of a surprise.  If you have a ball of this, it's going to pool no matter how many stitches you cast on, it's just a question of getting the pooling you can live with and then maintaining an identical tension until you finish.  The colours are two or three stitches long and even the tiniest shift makes a massive difference.  I restarted the first sock because my afternoon train-ride tension was producing a completely different pattern to the morning.

The finished article is crazy and random and looks rather as if a box of crayons had exploded in the yarn factory, which happily is just the kind of socks that H enjoys.

Two pairs of socks and a hat.  It doesn't sound like very much does it?  But at a conservative estimate it's 50 hours dedicated to cherishing my husband, and that can't be a bad gift. 

My little daughter's dress

It's been a bright sunshiney day here today, and what better way to enjoy it than by playing in the garden in a brand new warm woolly winter dress.  I'd planned to finish this for Kitty's birthday but as she's just a tad taller than the average bear and it was delayed while I ordered an extra ball of yarn.

But the new ball arrived last week and after a bit of playing around with the length I finished it off and handed it over to Kitty for some thorough product testing.  We've found it's good for picking grass...

... and for pushing our walker...

... and for crawling towards the edge of the wall....

... and bending ...

... and stretching.

And when we've finished all of that, for snuggling up in Mama's lap.

The pattern is Little Sister's Dress by Tora Froseth Design.  It's a simple, easy knit, and shows off the wonderful colours of a tropical fish Zauberball to their best advantage.

I knit the 18 month size but added a good few inches; to give you an idea of how much, I would have finished in the last section of dark blue and it would have barely covered her bottom.

The buttons came from my button tin (sorry for the lack of focus - little miss wriggles had decided she'd had enough of posing), they're red with little white stars around the edge and a perfect match.

H&M came up trumps again for long sleeved bright coloured baby vests and as well as this red one I found a turquoise that exactly matches the dress. I'm hoping that I've added enough extra length for this to last for a while but if she grows out of it there's a Big Sister Dress pattern that goes up to age 8.  It is very possible that she might acquire one in each size as she grows.

We went to the final birthday party of the season this afternoon and then popped into our favourite gallery and she was admired all around.  I think there could be a market for a grown up size - just maybe not in 4ply.

A swatch, a sleeve and two pocket linings

That's the sum of a long weekend’s worth of knitting. And the sleeve looks remarkably like a rewound ball of crinkly Madelinetosh 80/10/10.

The dry swatch suggested that I was knitting a little tighter than the 16.5 st to 4” gauge for the Grown Up Hoodie, but when I swished it and laid it out to dry it had gone the other way. “Ah-Ha!” I thought, “as I fall a bit in between two sizes I’ll cast on the smaller size and it will end up a bit bigger”. Cunning, no?

The swatch stayed loose and floppy over the weekend and I merrily knit my sleeve, noting that it was currently more fitted than I really wanted but safe in the knowledge that my swatch told me it would grow.

Last night I finished the sleeve. And the pocket linings.

This morning I measured the swatch again. 17 and a smidge stitches to four inches. Grr.

A fast minute or two on the ball winder and it was all over. Alas poor sleeve I knit you well. The only saving grace is that the pocket linings are the same for the two sizes.

And now you hear me little jumper. If after all of this swatching and knitting and ripping, you have the temerity to be something less than perfect I will not only cut you into little pieces, bury you in the garden and deny all knowledge, I will, I will …..

….. DELETE YOU FROM MY RAVELRY PAGE

You have been warned.

Spring Cleaning

I think I posted a little while ago about being frustrated with my uarn stash - the feeling that I had plenty of yarn but none of it was acutally useful or fitted to a project that I wanted to knit.  As buying a gazzilionty more skeins of beautiful new yarn is just a tad beyond the budget (although honesty compels me to tell you that there has been a pretty little squishy package arrived in the post recently and I very much hope there'll be another one as soon as it clears customs) it was time to pull out the stash and find out what I actually have.

The answer, as I expected, was a good amount of the little ends of balls of yarn from finished projects, a whole load of single skeins and a surprising amount of Baby Cashmerino in various colours - I forsee some sort of baby-sized colourwork in the near future.

 It's all rearranged now and mostly back in the cupboard; I gave myself permission to throw out lots of the little mini balls that are never going to be used for anything, and set aside some yarn that I'm never going to knit to be destashed as soon as I work out how Ebay works (discontinued Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4ply and some Rowan Pure Wool if anyone's interested).

I also started to pull together some yarn and patterns and move them into project bags to sit by my chair in the lounge in the hope that I might get the occasional moment to knit while little Miss plays in her Jumperoo next to me.

In the stash I rediscovered a whole load of oddments of DK and worsted weight cotton, mostly leftovers from Kitty's bib collection.  We've been using knitted dishcloths for years now and the problem is that they look like they've been used for years so my first stashbusting project united all the oddments and my favourite 5.5mm needles with butterflies painted on the ends.



I didn't have a pattern for these, I just cast on and went for it.  Most of them are knitted on the diagonal from a cast on of three stitches, increasing with yarnovers until it looked about the right size and then decreasing on every row with yarnovers in every alternate row back down to three.

The log cabin ish ones I started by knitting a little square and then turning 90 degrees at the end of the cast off and picking up the next block along the side.


Some are just plain, using up varigated yarn, the blue one is stripes in a Fibbonacci series, and then there are just purely random ones, striped entirely at whim.


When so much knitting requires careful attention to a pattern, and with so much else going on at the moment  it's been really relaxing to just go with it.

I've still got a little bit of turquoise and orange left over but I seem to have quenched my dishcloth thirst, and I think the kitchen is clean enough for now.

Warm tummies

I know I've been a bit Kitty-heavy in the blog posting recently; I mean I'm besotted with her, and so is her Daddy, her Aunts and Uncles, her Grandparents and her Godmummy Mandy, but apparently the rest of the known universe doesn't revolve around my daughter (who knew!) (and are they sure, I mean, can we really be certain).  Okay, okay, I promise to be good, and today I have actually knitting to show you, ably modelled by my gorgeous assistant:

I love spinning but there isn't much point in spinning pretty yarn if it's just going to sit in the stash so I've been hunting around Ravelry for patterns that use tiny amounts of not very well spun fluffy yarn.



The yarn is my first attempt at spinning a singles yarn from last year's Tour de Fleece from a mini batt; it was mostly DK weight with a bit of thick and thin and lots of little scraps of silk and sprinkle, and the pattern is the ever-versatile Milo.

I didn't use any of the cable patterns to try to stretch the available yarn as far as possible.  In the end, as you see, it still wasn't enough so the bottom ribbing is Noro Cash Iroha from the leftovers box but I think it compliments it nicely.





Today was a beautiful warm fresh sunny day, we had the windows open to air the house and all the laundry has been out on the line for that clean air smell.  Now that it's getting warmer, and now that Kitty is going for food in a big way, short sleeves let her wriggle around more easily, and make her easier to clean up so a little vest top is perfect for keeping her toasty warm.







Given that it has today survived an onslaught of cucumber and banana I think this is a winner - I've got my eye on a variation with little elephants on it!

In vain

I know the pattern is Seven Chakras, but to me it's always been a rainbow sock, which means that with a violet top and toe I've reached the end of my first rainbow, although sadly the pot of gold has failed to materialised.

After the orange 'herding cats' section the rest of the pattern felt like knitting garter stitch on fluffy pillows while cherubim bring you chocolate fudge cake and the yarn colours are, as always, beautiful. 

Now then, the important part, the things I need to remember when I come to the second sock.

Note 1:  add the extra row at the beginning of the blue section.
Note 2:  don't start the toe shaping until the first pattern row of the violet section, no decreases in the first two plain rounds.
Note 3: there are a good few errors in the pattern.  Check the errata.
Note 4: there is another error not picked up in the errata.  For the green foot section knit one stitch plain before and after the patterning - you have 72 sts for the large size and the patterning only covers 70 of them.

I do feel like I've knitted two socks because I've knitted each pattern twice so we shall see whether it takes as long to knit the second as the first.  The first sock just took me two years, six months and eleven days so I'm in no hurry and I suspect I'll be casting on again pretty soon because they are comfy cosy socks.

This is of course assuming that no one else has designs on them ...

And I have one final question; Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, but if your history doesn't include a Richard of York, or he was victorious - what mnemonic were you taught as a child to remember the colours of the rainbow?