Weekend cruising

The man has been dreaming of cruises the last few days. He dragged me out of bed at SIX THIRTY on saturday to go see the Queen Elizabeth II coming into Wellington harbour. It was rather lovely to watch it/her slide in over calm waters and I must admit to feeling a slight bit of pride that the harbour managed to behave nicely weather wise.



But now he is talking about cashing in the savings and us heading out on a cruise.. lots of knitting time for me I guess? We looked up the website and he was rather excitedly telling me we could get a room for $35k per head on some three month cruise. I checked it and he was misreading the $350k as $35k.... perhaps a trip across the harbour on the ferry instead.

On Sunday we were up early again, hubby wanted to go for a drive up the coast. We drove up as far as Levin, stopping in Otaki on the way to take a wander around a small craft market. It was fairly much the usual fare, handmade soaps, cheap jewelry, pink acrylic baby knits, jars of jams and pickles, secondhand tools and kitchenwares and plants propogated in yohurt pottles. There was one highlight for me, the pitcher plant man, he had this extraordinary table loaded with pitcher plants in all shades from deep red through to lime green. I find them absolutely fascinating to look at and will definitely return to buy some when I am a little more flush with cash. I should have taken photos, next time I will.

We checked out a few real estate windows, kind of half heartedly really. We've always had the dream of buying a home on a bit of land, keeping chooks and a good sized garden and maybe some pigs. But I think I am just too much of a town type person, I loves me my amenities. I need libraries, shops, activities, beaches, public transport. If I won the lotto would it be crazy and bought out my neighbours for too good to refuse prices, and got rid of their houses so I can play farms without moving? We could have all the work done while we're away on our $350k cruise and return home to our farmlet.

Weekend over and now it is time to get back to serious business. Today I sit down at the computer and make an entirely heroic effort to type up my pattern and NOT distract myself by playing games and reading ravelry posts.

I've knit up a couple of mitts now, and I'm happy with the stitches, I just need to find a way to write up the maybe quirky things that I do when I make stuff. Like when I am picking up stitches to work thumbs, or sleeves in a top down raglan. I always pick up 2-4 extras and then knit two together at key places to get back to the number I am supposed to have. This helps eliminate holes and reduces the pull on the stitches that are right at the apex(?) of the gusset. But how to explain that in just a few words, I hate knitting patterns that become mini novels.

And just to prove I did indeed knit a pair.



And this one is evidence of my usual problem.. knitting only one.



I am definitely going to get onto that pattern today, there are already people asking if they can test knit it for me. Such positive response to something I made! It's brilliant and I love feeling like I did something right, but there is a small grey cloud hanging over it, I always find that I get a bit stressed worrying that the pattern won't live up to peoples expectations. Should I multi size it or will they all be satisfied with one size doesn't quite fit all? will they be able to knit something that looks like mine?

Hairy men and Fairy bread

My son turned 21 on Wednesday. Sadly we didn't have much free cash around to celibrate with a meal out or something fancy, so we did the good old fashioned kiwi birthday party fare.

The menu was, cheerios (not the cereal! cocktail sized saveloys) chippies (potato crisps?) and dip, the dip made from a packet of dried onion soup and reduced cream. Sausage rolls and other small finger sized savory pies, rainbow jellies made in tall glasses and plenty of ice cream, lamingtons with freshly whipped cream and a chocolate cake decorated with M&Ms and of course the fairy bread. I'm not sure if people in lands far over the seas have experienced the culinary delight of fairy bread, mostly they seem slightly confused and a bit amused at the idea of putting cake sprinkles all over bread. I wonder if it is a very kiwi childhood treat, or where exactly the idea of it has come from.

recipe: you need lovely soft fresh squishy sliced bread, and soft spreadable room temperature butter (or margerine), spread a thin but even coating over teh slice. Trim the crusts away, fairies never eat crusts, they go out to the birds on the back lawn instead, or you can use cookie cutters to cut the bread into fun shapes. Now you need to get the pieces coated with an even layer of hundreds and thousands.. not sure what they are called in alternate universes, but here in kiwiland they are "hundreds and thousands" I pour mine into a shallow bowl and then just drop the bread shapes in butter side down and give the bowl a gentle swish. The rainbow balls stick to the butter just fine without too much hassle and then I just fish them out and place them on a plate.

And now, in my best TV chef voice, here's some I made earlier!



They're a favorite of the menfolk in my life. My now fifty year old hubby is highly upset if a birthday goes by without fairy bread gracing the table. In fact I actually buy large catering type bags of them at Moore Wilsons, they work out at about $8 for a huge 1.5kg bag vs the $2 or so for a small plastic pottle from the supermarket cake decorating section.

I did take pictures of my mitts finished and a pair at last, but I wasn't happy with the focus and the composition of the pics and the lighting wasn't the best. So I will amuse you with pictures of my knitting bits and pieces instead.

The small tin was one of the extras in a sock club I belonged to when finances were a little flusher, it came filled with jelly belly beans! mhmmm. The middle sized one was from guterman it comes with four reels of thread inside it and is just a perfect size for mostly anything of use. And the green one is a pencil tin from smiggle, the metal on it is little too thin and dents far too easily, a shame really because it is a good size and shape for knitterly things.



And the view inside.



In the smiggle tin I have my sock sized circulars and crochet hook and a needle sizer that is positively ancient, one of these days I will get one of those lovely little anodized aluminum pendant needle sizers.

In the thread tin I keep a tiny torch, this is just in case I need to read a pettern line in a powercut, I can knit in the dark but not read!. I have a small victorinox swiss army knife, the scissors are great for snipping ends, and the nail file is really useful for smoothing down any nails that get a bit catchy on yarn when you're knitting. I have some cable end buttons that I never use. And cable needles, created from broken circs. I whittled the broken ends down to a point (with the swiss army knife!) and then sanded smooth. I have a magnet in there to hold the tapestry needles and I used to have a small tape measure until fiddle fingers McCoy (not certain which one) fiddled one to many times and broke it.

The smallest tin holds my stitch markers, I keep a small polishes magnetic rock on there, it's really strong! and as a bonus the magnets help hold the tins together in my knitting bag so they are easy to find.

it's a Meh day

Well today was supposed to be a blog about finishing mitts, yay!, my sons 21st birthday (yesterday) fairy bread, chocolate cake and pattern writings. But I'm just in such a blergh mood that I really don't feel up to writing of the joys of tiny brightly coloured sugar crystals decorating light and fluffy bread.

for a while I've been feeling quite disjointed from my local knitting group. All through last year I kept offering to host the knit nights and felt like I was just brushed aside, you see I don't drive, so getting to the meetups was difficult for me. I used to post in the thread weekly asking if anyone was going and able to offer me a lift, but people stopped responding to that so I stopped asking. I still sometimes manage to make it to a meet up, but they are often held in ridiculously difficult places to get to, and often because I've not been going every week I feel so out of the loop I wonder why I went.

I look back when I first started attending, and many of the women whose company I enjoyed stopped turning up last year. And the ones wo do still go just seem kind of distant to me. Sometimes I feel like maybe my presence there is an interruption in their usual social clique, I'm not sure if they mean it to be that way, but I'm not feeling particularly welcome or included any longer. I think the real blerghness comes from discovering there has been a top secret 'other' knitting group going on all this time. I suppose I'm just not cool enough for either.. hence the sad feelings.

Oh well, life just happens, and I'm reminded that even us growed up persons can have social issues, maybe it's all just silly misunderstandings, or maybe it isn't. But the big girl thing to do is get over it, smile and go make new friends who might be more on the same wavelength as I am. I'm going to try an figure out a way to get into town on sundays to meet up with the Wellington group at the botanical gardens. Neutral territory sounds good to me, and if it is all just too awful and awkward, there is always the begonia house to go take photographs in, or the rose gardens to take a wander around. I need something, some kind of contact with the outside world, being at home all the time and dealing with so many demanding situations takes its toll, and it is just so nice to get out and have a touch of normal from time to time, even if the normal is a bunch of yarn crazed knitters.

I'll finish this off with some prettiness from my last visit to the begonia house, because it makes me feel happy

this pond is full of guppies, my kids used to think they were there specially for children to catch



Red things which I do know the name off but can't for the life of me recall what it is right now



The hiroshima peace garden, it is a lovely quiet corner of the gardens which is often passed by, I enjoy taking time out to sit here



Bolton st cemetary which is next to the gardens and full of much of Wellingtons early pioneer settler history/bones



Orchids are so much more well behaved subjects then children or pets. If I could do it all over, I think I might adopt an orchid

Playing yarn chicken!

This is the fun game, the part where we are shopping for yarn and make the decision that we can scrape by with just enough yarn, rather then purchasing another ball that might not get used. I think this is probably what started off my adventures with colourwork, I was about 12 years old, and buying yarn to knit myself a jumper with my birthday money and the lovely lady at the LYS suggested I buy not one, but TWO extra 50gr balls in the same shade lot... just in case. I was mortified that my project was suddenly going to cost more then I had budgeted for and decided to buy one of each colour and knit stripes instead. I figured that if I ran out then it'd be easy enough to find scraps from my mothers stash, or buy a new ball of something else and throw that into the mix. And so it began.

I wonder if you took all the extra balls of yarn that people bought to be sure they had 'enough' in the right dye lot, and piled them all together. How high would the mountain reach? How much of a yarn manufacturers, or resale outlets profits are gained from yarn that will never see use because it is the long forgotten orphan at the bottom of the basket, a leftover from a project that has long since been worn out, felted, caught on a twig and pulled or just given over to the cat to line its bed. A ball in all its pristine newness, with a ballband that might be a little tatty from storage but otherwise still readable. I'm not talking about the sweater loads of stash people have ferreted away for 'some day' but just the leftovers that they were persuaded to buy by well intentioned shop keepers.. I guess that is what charity afghans are for huh, to consume all those overflows.. if we only ever bough just enough then there'd be no charity afghans!

Anyways, back to playing chicken. I forgot to weigh my yarn before I started knitting my mitts. Now there are a few things I 'know' about the yarn I have. I know it came in 25 gr skeins. And I know that after knitting one finished mitt, plus the lace part of the second mitt that I now have 12.4 grams of the chalk left, and 23.3 grams of the lichen left. Uh oh.. can I assume that the lichen weighed in at more then 25 grams? I'm pretty certain there is no way I knit that much from 1.7 grams of yarn... so does this mean there is a good chance the chalk weighed in at over 25 grams too? The lace section for the second mitt weighs 2.6grams. I can't weigh the finished mitt yet, since it is still a bit damp from blocking, but from where I sit now it is looking like I might be cutting it really fine with the chalk. I did knit a tiny test swatch in the two colours that weighs 1.4grams. So that is on hand if I need to frog it. And there is about three meters that I wound off the ball to see how the yarn poofed up after washing. I think I will need luck on this one!

As a taster, here is the first one completed. I can't decide if I will be bothered to write up the pattern so other peopel can understand it, or just keep it for myself. I kind of unvented the cast off, since all the kids had the computers at the time so I just played about and made up something that worked.

Mitts continued

So I didn't do much on the knitting yesterday because I was busy with this

yum! I still have several more cucumbers to deal to, but I need to buy more onion and mustard seeds before I can start on the batch. So until then it is a return to my mitts.

Yesterday I finalised the shapings, worked out the maths for thumb increases and how high to go with it and decided on a pattern for the palm side of it all. It's actually realy difficult to picture how a simple pattern will end up working with the main motif, it needs to compliment it, but not overpower, and the colours need to retain some kind of balance. I've worked up half a mitt and aside from a few tension issues, which I hope will block out, they're looking pretty good.

I've cleaned up notes, and scribbles and added them into my sketch book. I'll just add at this stage how much I love the fact that my kids never used up all their glue sticks, and how buying the more expensive ones ( scotch brand) paid off as they didn't dry out like the cheaper ones I already had to throw out have. Glue sticks are so much love >

And here are the mitts.. mitt? so far back and palm sides. I'm hoping the yarn blooms up to fill out the gaps! I did soak one of the lace sections and that thickened up a bit so I am hopeful. The yarn is already softening up nicely as I am working it too, and it feels lovely and light. I'm not sure I will have enough of the chalk to finish the pair though, but the green should hold up just fine.

Koru mitts

Well my yarn from Holst Garn arived on Saturday, I spent the day swatching with the 100% wool and getting to know it a little better. It is soft after washing in soak, but not as soft as we merino-spoilt kiwis are used to. It has a nice drape on 3mm needles, a decently firm fabric on 2.5mm, I knit it double on 3.75mm too, but I think I would go to 4mm if I were using it double. The yarn actually knits quite nicely double stranded and once it is blocked you'd never be able to tell it was two strands of a finer yarn. I'm also working a lace sample on the 3.75, but that has been set aside from my other project, the koru mitts.

On seeing the green I decided that it needed to become something foresty and New Zealandish, so I did a search for koru, fern, spiral.. couldn't find anything on Ravelry or google. Plan B, design my own! Well this is where I astound everyone with my superior design wowness... or in other words show how easy it is to create something utter fail.

Firstly the yarn, see how pretty it is! Really, I have never bought yarn that has compelled me so deeply to photograph it. Now I have to buy more, purely for the artsy yarn shots I can imagine in rustic hand made baskets and olde fashioned kitchen scales.

See PRETTY! I just love the transparent label giving you a glimpse of the yarn beneath, it's totally boudoir dressing for yarn!

So I have a deep olivey green and a soft pale fawny shade, and over on Ravelry in the fingerless gloves group there is a colourwork KAL (knit along) The occasion calls for a new pattern. Firstly I google, I'm looking for images of tree ferns to inspire me, after looking for half an hour or so I decide nothing works and that I am better off going for a less literal translation of a fern, so I doodle on paper a bit. My favorite graph paper for knitting patterns is from knitonthenet you can to create your own graph paper to the gage -you- knit to and then you can print it out.

I just draw my picture lightly on the paper and then start pixelating it. I decided for this pattern that I will embroider the central spine of the leaf since I wanted to keep a graceful curve and it wasn't going to work in small squares. The pattern fits into 30 stitches width, which works in with my guesstimated 60 stitches around for the body of the mitts. Only knitting a full swatch will really tell me for sure.

I couldn't decide if I wanted a pretty lacey edge, or a corrugated ribbed edge, I figured corrugated rib would actually be pretty boring since there are only two colours, and corrugated ribbing only really shines when there are a few shades in play. So I went searching for lace edgings. I found one called aspen leaf, though in other places it is called oak leaf and in this place I shall call it Fern because that is what it looks like to me. See the prettiness in unblocked state. This is knitted in the holst garn chalk colourway

The repeats are 10 rows each, since you generally pick up every second row in a knitted border, I figured that I'd need to knit 12 repeats, or 120 rows.. whoa, wrong! I guess if I wanted frilly ruffled kind of glove edging, but hey I am not -that- feminine. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong actually, all the other patterns I could find that used a knitted lace edging, indicated that you would pick up one stitch for every two rows of the edging. I came to the conclusion that I didn't want to knit my edging in the same way because I wanted my lace edging to open up more. So I ripped back the edge to 8 repeats.

So how to turn 80 rows into 60 picked up stitches. I came to a simple formula ( Finally kindergarten maths pays off!) pick up one stitch in every row for three rows, then skip one. Yeah ok so I'm not up for any nobel peace prizes or anything, but it was one of those eureka moments that gave me a moment of smug satisfaction.

Now I have some fiddling to do, I need to figure out where to begin my thumb shaping, how many increases to make and where to end it so it sits comfortably on my thumb. But none of that is happening until after I have sliced up my cucumbers for a batch of bread and butter pickles.

New year, kind of late

So I found the password again, and Christmas/summer is over and done with, time to start getting serious about things again and turning attention back to moving ahead.

It's raining here today, the weather is driving me indoors and away from the garden, so I think this might be a good time to go through the stash bins and take inventory of what is there before I start getting the urge to add to the collection!

Speaking of urges, I did crumble just a little and ordered some Holst Garn from Denmark, it works out fairly reasonable price with the shipping and it comes in a whopping 120 colours! I just ordered a small 25 gr ball of the wool, and two of the wool silk blend, 75 gr was the limit for the lowest shipping price and I want to get a feel for how it handles and behaves to see if I want to order a colour card. I do love that they actually sell it in 25, 50 and 500 gram amounts, so you can buy as little as you need, or a whole cone which is even cheaper.

This week I am also waiting on my replacement Signature arts circular needles, my other ones developed a but of a split in the cable and I emailed them, they were awesome for service and are replacing them for me, I was also drooling over their straights. I may just have to convert back to knitting on straights just as an excuse to buy myself a pair. I think I need to get some 3mm with stiletto points and bell end caps, such a pretty blue.

I'm also waiting on my third installment of Janel Laidmans colour club, I didn't really need to learn how to colourwork as I have been knitting it for thirty years, but I am a sucker for kit things, something about opening up a package of perfectly sized portions of many colours. So far I have been quite pleased with the yarns, the first was Codex from Sanguine Gryphon, a lovely yarn to work with, though heavier then I usually use and probably too thick for our NZ winters. I made a cowl for my daughter, she might appreciate it while walking to her tourism course in town over winter.

The second project was mittens in Brooklyn Tweed Shelter yarn It is quite a 'rustic' yarn for me, there was a fair bit of vege matter in it to, which is not an issue for me as I knit with noro already. I've not blocked it yet, or washed it, I get the feeling it will soften up a little more, and I am definitely softening up to the more rustic type yarns. I think a mens pullover in shelter would be lovely, but a tad expensive!