interknittent

Oh hello, internets! I'm sorry it's been so long. Since I last posted here, I've completed my PhD; been viva'd and graduated; worked as a medical secretary for eight months and then as a training officer for six months; civilised my lady; moved from Leeds to Manchester; and knitted four and a half cardigans, one jumper, two gloves, and a ... babydoll sort of thing. The only one I seem to have photos of is the last, and fittingly, it was the first completed. Here it is:



It is silly and fripperaneous and I do adore it. I actually took these pictures just over a year ago (my hair doesn't look like that any more!), and I currently wear it at least once a week, over a dark blue or grey long-sleeved t-shirt and a slim fitting skirt or trousers. It's a madey-uppy top-down raglan. I based the puffed sleeves on the pattern for Zephyrstyle's Rusted Root, which my girlfriend has. Then I added a stitch about 50% more stitches just below the bust, so it has this silly little babydoll shape to it. At the bottom there's a bit of texture created by alternating a row of garter stitch with a row of moss stitch and then another row of garter stitch. The yarn is a pure wool one from Kingcraig, and it's fantastically warm: perfect for a short-sleeved top worn over long skinny sleeves. And the buttons are from Samuel Taylor's in Leeds, and just gorgeous:


I'll try and have a modelling session soon and get pictures of a few of the others!

place holder

Apologies, dear readers, if there are any of you still out there. I should have done this earlier, but summer happened rather fast.

I am thirteen days off handing in my thesis, at which point a slightly more regular service will be resumed. See you in October!

bothar raglan

As promised, the finished Raglan Road:






raglan road



That's my own pattern, knitted in Sirdar Indigo Pure Cotton Denim DK on 4mms. I had 500g, and I've one full ball and a few bits and pieces left.

And I love it! It's easy and sexy and soft, the perfect long-sleeves for summer. As soon as it warms back up again, I'll wear it tied loosely over waistless dresses. And I'm going to take it with me in August when we go to Portugal to stay with my girlfriend's cousin: I'll shove it in my bag when I'm wearing sandals and a long patterned maxi-dress, and then pull it on an hour or so after sunset, as we sit out drinking local wine and listening to the crickets and talking rubbish. The indigo dye is also supposed to face and change as it gets washed, so the lace pattern will become more pronounced.

Definitely a success!

progress report

So, Raglan Road is finished, and Josephina is begun.

Raglan Road took longer than it really ought to have done, because I kept changing my mind about how to do it. First of all, because I wanted to seam as little as possible, I knitted a flat, single-piece body, and two sleeves in the round:






raglan road part one, blocking



But then I decided that I didn't even want to do that much seamer, ripped it back to the beginning of the raglan shaping - keeping twelve stitches from each sleeve and each side of the body live - and started knitting the yoke all in one:




raglan road reknit



Shortly after I took that photo, I realised that I'd actually got one arm slightly closer to the front than the other, so I ripped back down to the sleeve and body join again, and reknitted. This time it stuck! I finished the underarms by putting the 24 stitches from the body and the sleeve alternately and casting them off, and did a plain cast off around the back of the neck. And here she blocks:




raglan road, final blocking



And ooh, let's have a close up of that lace:






I've also knitted a long i-cord and threaded it through the holes just above the end of the lace pattern, and it is actually totally perfect. Pictures of the garment being modelled will follow, when my glitzing girl comes back from Germany and takes them.

All I need now is for the warm weather to come back.

***

Meanwhile, I've made a start on Josephina:






josephina



And - well, what do you think? That's the "skirt" part, which will fall from just under the bust to the top of the hips, and has a short row every two rows, so it's double the width at the bottom that it is at the top. The mercerised cotton has brilliant stitch definition ... which is not actually a good thing, because it makes it extraordinarily difficult to get the ends of the short rows to blend in. I haven't decided whether the garter stitch side or the stocking stitch side is the right side yet, but it's a problem on either. There's always a gap or a knot, no matter how I do it or how much I fiddle with it.

I'm going to persevere with it - that's on 2.5mm Addi turbos, but it's knitting up faster than you'd expect - but I have a sneaky suspicion that this would actually work much better in a wool, or a wool blend. Perhaps I will end up re-making it as a winter top, not a summer one?

josephina

Not much to report on the knitting front, friends - I have about six inches left of the second sleeve to do on raglan road, and then it will just need blocking and sewing up. My thesis writing schedule is having a detrimental effect of my knitting, and no noticeable effect on my thesis. Oh well! Onwards and upwards.

But in the midst of this soulless and lonely work, something bright and cheerful arrived on my doorstep: the yarn for josephina! Such are my powers of indecision that I ended up buying both the Garden Flowers silk/cotton mix and the Empress crochet cotton, on the grounds that I am not, after all, the kind of girl who couldn't possibly find a use for 500g of randomly coloured summer yarn:




600g of Empress Crochet Cotton





375g of Garden Flowers, 70% Silk & 30% Cotton, on 25g spools



Eeeee! So pretty! And also, so utterly tiny: whichever one I use, I will have to double it, which is easy in the case of the Garden Flowers, as I have doubles of all the various colours, but harder in the case of Empress, which will need to be wound onto something else. I think I will look for yarn winders on Ebay.

I am leaning towards Empress for Josephina, and some skinny little cardigan in Garden Flowers, but who can say? Swatches coming right up!

raglan road

Wandering around Ranelagh and Donnybrook the other evening, we noticed that there were places where the ground was starting to look dry: we've had over a week, I think, of sunny days, and spring is quite definitely in residence. Wool has been put away, and I am dreaming of cotton, linen, viscose and silk. Summer knitting!

I've made a healthy start on the Sirdar Denim cardigan that I mentioned nearly a month ago:






raglan road



The guiding principle of this knit seems to be to avoid seams as far as possible: I've knitted the body in a single piece, and have started one of the sleeves in the round, so the only thing I'll have to sew will be the raglan seams. The lace around the bottom is, er, "borrowed" from Knitty's Soleil, but on a 12 stitch repeat rather than a 10 stitch one.

My gauge is all sorts of wonky: I originally knitted this yarn on 3.75mms, I think, and rather tightly. It's now on 4mm Addi Turbos and very loose, but not quite evenly so. I am hoping that blocking it will work the usual miracle, and I'll have a lovely drapey fabric. Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, I am looking for yarn for my next project, Josephina:




Josephina



Named because it will (if I can find the yarn) be a top of many colours. At least five, and possibly six or more. The top piece will made the same way as my doomed Cannibal's Sack Sweater Dress, as a top-down raglan. The "skirt" part will be knitted horizontally using short-rows, so it really swings. I'm going to do it in reverse stocking stitch, using nothing bigger than DK, and possibly 4-ply or smaller.

I'm looking for yarn on Texera, which has many some utternly fabulous yarns for wonderful prices. But. The brightest, most beautiful colours (Good Fortune, Double Top) come in 250g cones and cost £7.20 each, which would mean that I would only be able to do it in two colours. Kilnsey (DK), Monaco (Aran) and Provence (DK) are all cheaper, but the colours just aren't as brilliant.

The best bet might be Garden Flower Silk (70% silk, 30% cotton), but it's tiny, tiny yarn - 1000m to 100g, where DK is around 160m and 4-ply is 340m. On the other hand, if it comes in 25g spools, then I can hold two or even three strands together. Or there's Empress, which is 3ply. What do do, what to do?

tragedy!

Those of you who follow my lovely glitzing girl's journal will know that she is currently working in the North, and we are a sad bi-national household. This week and next, however, are her vacation, so she is down in Dublin for two whole weeks, and O, it's so great. Our living room on Saturday night was pretty much a perfect image of what our lives are like together:






living one, two, three

That's us, look! Three lots of knitting (one on needles, one blocking, one semi-abandoned), a bottle of wine (empty), a packet of biscuits (empty), a vase of flowers (bought for me), two Macs (overused), many newspapers (mostly read), many mobiles (two UK, two Irish, two German if they happened to be around) and various bags and bits of outerwear. The flat is on the market at the moment, so it is all extremely superficial mess: in fact, as soon as I have posted I should tidy a bit. But that's our life together, right there. Isn't it brilliant?

***

The blocking on the gold sofa is the fairy knitting, which I haven't finished but decided on a (slightly drunken) whim to block anyway. Since last I posted, I have no new projects of which to boast, but the fairy knitting goes from strength to strength. I've finished shaping the armholes, and have only about four or five repeats of the pattern to do before I can shape the back of the neck and shoulders. However, the blocking has revealed a TRAGEDY:






fairy tragedy!


Somewhere over the past eight months that I've been knitting, I've completely changed my gauge: the back piece that I'm knitting at the moment is much, much looser than the front. The front piece (on the right), has been pinned out very taut and stretched, whilst the back (on the left) has been blocked very casually, just by smoothing the fabric out. And yet, it is still a good inch and a half taller than the front. Oh dear. Oh dear. The back is much nice fabric, but this means that I will have to knit the front all over again. The completion date goes back another six months.

Sigh.