26 posts tagged “lace”
I finished the Komet Socks for a friend for Christmas and I am so pleased with the way they turned out. I think that they look gorgeous and they were great fun to knit. I shall definitely be knitting more of Stephanie Van Der Linden's patterns, free and paid since it was interesting and really well written. It looks really complicated and yet I was still able to memorise the pattern quickly which was precisely the sort of knit I was looking for. I think that the mixture of cables and lace makes the cables pop out even more.
I realised very late that Indigo Moon, the yarn I used, which whilst absolutely beautiful in terms of colour is probably the louet gems base yarn which is just not my favourite really and that was a shame. On the up side these are a gift so I won't be wearing them if that is a problem for me.
I also completed them during the blue phase of Project Spectrum. I haven't been following Project Spectrum much in my knitting this year. I think I got put off because it started with a colour I really didn't like and my knitting never got back in sync after that.
Wow - it is so long since I have posted. I did lose some mojo for a while and coupled with the dodgy typing on my laptop it has curtailed my desire to blog so much but I am going to try and make up for that now.
The first project I completed is the nearly fated Titania socks. I started these in some Natural Dye Studio yarn in rosebud which pooled in a very ugly way and didn't work at all. Then I lost the patter for about 2 years then I found the pattern and eventually tried it out with some Blue Moon Fibre Arts Socks that Rock in Thraven from the raven series of yarns overdyed in black. It was dark and gothic and gorgeous (despite it being nearly 10 years I am still a recovering goth!) and became the Dark Titania's Revenge socks. They are a little bit big for me (but my other pair of STR have felted a little bit so I am figuring that this might just reduce them to a perfect fit over time) and because of warm(ish) weather I have only been able to wear them a couple of times since finishing them. But I love them and I can't wait to wear them lots in Winter.
The pattern was lots of fun but it was hard to decrease the lace part over the top of the foot and make it look nice. There aren't great instructions for this so it was sort of a case of making it up as you go along which is fine but they haven't come out quite as well as I would have liked. Only I will ever know that though so I am not too worried but I would probably try and fix this if I was knitting these socks a second time in a lighter yarn where it would be more obvious.
Socks that Rock Mediumweight yarn is ok but a little bit on the thick side for my preference. I have 2 skeins of mediumweight left though and I like it, just in future will probably prefer to buy lightweight.
So far I am doing well on the Christmas Knitting. I have 3 pairs of socks finished, 1 pair almost finished and a 2nd pair in progress and 1 cowl of my own design finished.
This means there is only 2.5 pairs of socks (ish) left to knit and I am done for Christmas Yay!
But I wanted to do a little post with some of the work in progress for that.
Firstly the completed socks from my father out-law now named A Sky full of Bees for obvious reasons (although J insists they are called a sky full of bananas).
Secondly I am working on some Komet socks for T. This is a free pattern by Stephanie Van Der Linden from her Sockenkreativliste. There were several amazing patterns put out on this list which I was dying to try and this is the first time I have finally managed to cast one on. The pattern is interesting and intricate but not horribly complicated (although it looks it to people who don't knit!). I am knitting it in Indigo Moon merino yarn which is nice. The yarn is in a blue semi solid which is perfect for the pattern and it sort of plumps up during the knitting process which is great. It has a nice sheen and twist on it and is soft. This was part of the haul I bought at Socktopus back in the spring. I would probably buy more of this yarn if the right colour came along but since I am trying to save money these days that won't be for a while.
I shall definitely be trying out more of Stephanie's patterns in the future!
This is my most successful lace project to date (almost). As soon as I bought Victorian Lace Today my eye instantly fell on this pattern. It has a very fun stitch - the melon stitch which was really fast and it was also my first time knitting on a border which turned out to be something incredibly enjoyable.
I chose 2 skeins of The Knittery - Merino Cashmere yarn (bought when I visited Socktopus) for this project in Passionfruit. A sort of muted purple colour which was very attractive. The yarn was incredibly soft and squishy and a little thicker than my usual sockweight. The Knittery yarns are produced by a very talented dyer in Australia who has very sadly stopped dyeing due to moving to the States and it is not clear it she will resume. Still this was very beautiful yarn and the melon stitch shawl would show it off to perfect. You may be wondering what went wrong after all this eulogising.
Well the yarn and pattern were perfect, it was fun to knit and knitting on borders became one of my favourite things. However I carefully calculated my yardage according to gauge and had quite a lot left over to comfortably finish. Except I discovered that Victorian Lace Today is renowned for underestimating yardage requirements! (a bit of a cardinal sin for a knitting book) and this pattern was no exception. Herein started my problem…the yarn was amazing and understandably this colour had sold out at Socktopus. Socktopus were the only UK stockists (Alice was really helpful and very sympathetic over the phone but not a miracle worker sadly). The Dyer was not selling it on her website anymore because she has stopped dyeing. So I turned to Ravelry and started to post on the boards begging for leftovers. Eventually one kinds person in Australia said that they would sell me their skein and I jumped at the chance. The yarn cost a great deal more to obtain then I would normally have paid and the dye lot was not a match but it was worth it to finish the shawl (I just couldn't bear to have frogged all my elegant hard work) and the dye lot change whilst obvious isn't in an obvious place on the shawl when worn. It isn't exactly how I imagined it but I am pretty pleased with it all things considered. I mean I might never have found even vaguely matching yarn which would have been a disaster.
Anyway it is blocked and put away to wear when the wear gets really really cold.
This left me with a huge cake of leftover passionfruit yarn and this yarn really is too good to have as just socks. The subtle colours deserve to be shown off and the texture is so soft it really need to be around the neck. My sister commented on how much she liked the Melon stitch shawl and so I decided to use the leftovers to make her a Christmas present (no way I could have parted with the shawl at that point!). I designed a simple cowl to get the most out of the yardage and while once again I ended up knitting on fumes and finishing it off with 6 stitches of similar but slightly different yarn I think it looks great.
I cast on x stitches in the round and knitted the following pattern with a 4.5mm needle.
Row 1 purl
Row 2 knit
Row 3 purl
Row 4 knit
Row 5 purl
Row 6 - 20 knit 3 purl 1 (rpt)
Then I repeated the sequence until I was happy it was long enough. Then I just purled and knitted alternate rows until I ran out of yarn .
Very simple but I think it looks really elegant and it is buttery soft and very warm.
Shortly into my Lakes holiday I finished the Absinthe Socks in Wollmeise Frosch. I am incredibly pleased with these socks. The pattern was a huge amount of fun, the yarn matched it perfectly! and they look and feel great, a perfect marriage of socks. My only slight complaint is that the cables which sit on the top of the foot where the ankle and foot meet are tight and stretch a little too much. Ii didn't irritate me while I wore them yesterday and I did walk a couple of miles out of town to visit a ruined Roman Fort so they were put through a proper test run.
I don't normally "save" special yarn for a perfect pattern but because this was my last skein of Wollmeise I did this time and I am glad that I did.
Now I have worn and washed these a lot I can attest that they yarn is still very soft and the colour has not faded at all. They truely do live up to the hype - if only it was easier to get.
I have finally finished the Austrian Socks. These are some amazing heavily cabled socks from Favourite Socks which my sister said she really like when she flicked through the book. I have been working on them for her birthday but they have taken me a very long time. I think that it is because they have such a complex pattern that I needed to take the book with me everywhere or knit them at home and they isn't the most convenient type of knitting. There was also an embarrassing ripping back incident when I thought that I had memorised the pattern and was very very wrong about that.
This will tick off part of my challenge to knit every sock in Favourite Socks no. 4 and to give my sister 3 pairs of knitted socks no 69 from 101 things. I really hope she likes them as I chose a delicate pink and green yarn that I thought she would like.
The yarn is Easyknitter's bfl in the Blossom colourway I think and as always was a dream to knit with.
Sunday a Triskellian and Kauket came over for a knit in day. For me the point of this (apart from socialising with people I love) was to a) discuss knitting with people who knit b) get motivated to sort out UFOs and other annoying jobs that I have been putting off.
As I have already mentioned I first took the opportunity to complete Durrow and I really don’t think I would’ve had the motivation to sort this out without the Knit In day. I also frogged the Mystic Star Shawl. I was very demotivated, was finding the almost black cobweb weight yarn very difficult to deal with and whilst I liked the pattern, I have recently bought Victorian Lace Today which has some other patterns I much prefer that I wanted to use the yarn on instead. I may come back to the Star Shawl one day (just with a thicker, lighter yarn) we will see.
I also managed to sew up one side and one ribbon (out of four) onto the baby kimono. Sewing this up has not been a lot of fun, I put it off for ages and once I had finished sewing one side I totally lost motivation to sew up another side. I am not entirely sure why, after all I am happy to sew in general. In fact I was so disheartened with the sewing I cast on another project (I decided that frogging one and finishing another meant that another slot had come up).
I have been wanting another big scarf for a long time. I wear my Clapotis almost everyday, it is a perfect size, with just the right amount of warmth and drape. I don’t want to knit a third Clapotis though (I think I may die of boredom) and so I have been searching for an alternative. It had to be lacy since this is where the right amount of drape will be generated and yet light enough to wear in spring or wound round my neck 2-3 times in winter so I was going for a sock yarn weight. Well at Socktopus last weekend I bought 2 skeins of The Knittery Merino Cashmere Sock in Passionfruit (Purples and Grays) deliberately for such a project and I would be lying if I didn’t have a pattern in mind. In my new favourite book (Victorian Lace Today) the first pattern which jumped out at me was… the melon stitch shawl. I wound up one ball on Sunday and cast on knitting the first 6 repeats whilst we watched Daywatch (Sequel to the Russian Film Nightwatch and very good indeed).
Here is the in Progress Pic which I am loving.
The pattern is simple enough to do during TV watching (even during a subtitled film) but the melon stitch itself (once every 6 rows) is interesting enough that it doesn’t get boring. When I have finished 62 repeats of the main pattern (I am on number 10 right now) I can cast off and try my first ever knitted on lace border which is very exciting indeed.
I also took the opportunity of visitors to have a nice 2 course meal (by candle light since we were celebrating Earth Hour) and made the following
Roast Chicken with chives (from our garden), tarragon and parsley – all worked into butter which was stuffed just under the skin to self baste the chicken.
Lentils cooked in red wine and stock.
Vine Ripened Tomatoes roasted with basil … all from Rick Stein
Then to finish I had made a cake (which we had already eaten some of earlier in the day) from a recipe I found on the Guardian Website months ago. This was a fair trade chocolate, chilli and orange cake. It sounds weird but the amount of chilli is very small and just gives it a nice kick – I finished it off with Crème Fraiche which was a total inspiration as it was not to sweet and cut through the very dark rich chocolate cake. I cooked the cake entirely from my baking stash so in a way it was completely free since I didn’t have to buy anything even the crème fraiche was left over from another meal.
I really hope we can arrange another one – although it may be a dangerous thing, I am already getting spinning curious and too much exposure to Triskellian doing drop spindling may tip me over the edge. As a buffer to this I am buying some Procion Acid Dyes for Yarn. I have 2 lots of yarn that need overdying and 1 lot that needs dyeing from scratch so learning this new skill should put off the inevitable learning to spin for a while at least.
I have finished the Firestarter socks by Yarnissma and J wore them for the first time this weekend.
I am pleased with the way they look but the cable pattern doesn't really show up. I know that these are designed for a busy yarn. Sadly I think that my yarn was too busy even for that. Still J loves the loud socks and these are really very loud. I adore Yarnissma's gusset details. It is a signature of hers and I hope that you can see it in the photos. It was also a very fun knit that I would highly recommend. It was simply enough to do on the train and yet the cabling gave it enough interest that I wasn't going out of my mind with boredom. A great pattern and all the more so because it was free!
The yarn is Plum and Custard by Easyknitter and as always was a joy to use.
My knitting has reached something of a dilemma now. The mystic star shawl is really getting very complicated now. I am nearly at the end of clue three and clue four is out. Clue four is bigger than all previous clues put together and have over 500 stitches per row. I will be working on this for a very very long time and as such need to have another project running alongside for commuter knitting and so that I feel I am making progress. Previously I had said I wanted to finished the shawl before I started test knitting for triskellian but if I do that I won't start the test knitting for a good month or more and I would like to start it sooner than that. So once the baby clothes I am knitting are done (a friend is pregnant and due late March) I will be casting on for the test knitting. I have at least chosen my testing knitting yarns. Black opal and the strange red and pink yarn I bought 500g for £5 at Ally Pally in 2007. They are the same weight and should contrast perfectly.
More on the baby jacket when I have taken some photos.
Sadly there will be no photos of the Mystic Shawl until I have really completely finished it. I can no longer spread it out on the circular needle as I have run out of space.
I finished clue one of the mystery shawl in good time despite a couple of false starts. It used something call the disappearing loop cast on - from this wonderful blog which is designed to get around the problem of having a little hard knot from the slip knot in the middle of your shawl. It was a very tricky cast on and I am not sure I think it was worth the faff to get rid of the little knit but then since I am using cobweb weight yarn the knot would have been so small it probably wouldn't have noticed anyway.
The nice thing about this shawl is that by breaking up the pattern into pieces it is not too overwhelming as a large Pi shawl might otherwise have been. By taking it one small section at a time it is manageable. Also I am being religious about checking my row count at regular intervals. The last thing I need is to miss a stitch and not find out for a long time afterwards.
Here is my in progress shot.
It does seems more airey than most of the in progress shots on ravelry but then I am using cobweb weight yarn and not tencel laceweight which looks much thicker. It is certainly very delicate looking but I am sure that when I have more knitted up then the design will become more obvious and I will stop fretting that it is too thin and doesn't look much like my gauge swatch.
Of course the next clue comes out today and given we have a snow day if I run out of work I know what I will be doing!
I finally got round to taking a photo of this with my new blocking wires.
In order to make myself feel better about the brevity of this second post I wanted to post a picture of the vintage buttons I was bought for Christmas by my Mum. I have not idea where she got them and I think that they are metal but they are seriously the nicest buttons I have ever seen. I can't imagine what I can possibly make that will do the buttons justice, but if I put a picture of them up out here then at least inspiration may strike me. I am thinking of making a new sock knitting bag tomorrow and I might put one of these buttons on it just so that I can always have it with me to look at when I feel like it.
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