The quiet times in life

Starting this with some pretty, last nights sunset. I so badly need a camera that does scenic shots as amazingly as my current one does macro






It's been over a week since the big quake hit Christchurch, and while life must go on, I have noticed the entire country seemed more subdued. Forums centered around New Zealand folk are fairly quiet, it seems as if we are all more aware of just how trivial our usual everyday chatter is.

We had a reasonable jolt here in Wellington the other night it definitely put all of us on alert and I have been going through our emergency supplies making sure things are up to date and batteries functioning etc. I also added a couple of balls of yarn, a few excess circs and vanilla sock instructions to the two containers we keep.. you know, just in case.

It really has been a time of reflection on what is important to me in my life, just what would I grab? the photos? the heirloom china? the various bits and pieces I've discovered in junk shops over the years? I was pondering this, would I make my way to the bedroom to unearth my trollbeads collection? or rescue my cashmere merino sock yarn from the lounge. Maybe I would make a dive for the tin in drawer that keeps all the important documents safe. Or perhaps the CD that store old photographs. Nope, at the end of the day,while I am slightly sentimental, I've realised just how practical I really am. My thing I would spend a few moments searching for (if I had the time) is the tramping boots that usually lurk somewhere in my bedroom. I think I need to go find them and make sure they are somewhere easily got to, so I can move my must rescue at all costs item along to being one of the more sentimental options.

So on to quake, I'm not going to mention stats or talk about quake drama, there are enough people already doing that. When I first got news of it and settled down to watch the tv, I felt the need to do something to help out, sending parcels of food down is a waste of resources and time and creates issues. They needed/need money but I don't have much spare in my weekly budget. What I do have however are designing skills, I already have two knitting patterns I have self published and sell via Ravelry so I decided to donate 100% profits from those sales to the quake fund until the end of march.

Then I started hearing more about the womens refuge center, and how after the dust settles families are still pushed to the limits emotionally, parents become stressed to the point of passing that snapping point. And sometimes the best thing for a mother is to just get out of dodge with her children in tow. So I designed a hat specially to raise money for womens refuge in New Zealand. Not only will 100% of the profits from it be going to the womens refuge in Christchurch until the end of march, but as an ongoing fundraiser I will be donating the profits from the sale of this pattern to womens refuge NZ.



The pattern is named "Kids Play" and is written for three sizes from toddler through to large child/adult. It will be available on Ravelry in the next few days as I tidy up some of the rough edges in my writing.

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.

Whoops! .. and a new camera

Ok so I am guilty of forgetting this thing, if it were a pet I'd have the SPCA on my back. Well in the news lately, my camera gave up on me after struggling to hang in there over the last few months. I was suddenly faced with having to replace it but as I had not been in the market for one I had no idea what I wanted. I spent a couple of nights online checking out sales and reviews, I decided to stick with panasonic as I had been pretty happy with the previous one and they always seem to get fairly decent reviews, that only left me with the question of how much camera did I need.

I had been wanting to up my game a bit on the photography front, and had been toying with the idea of jumping into the DLSR pool. However aside from the cost of them, I wasn't overly thrilled by the idea of the size of it, and extra lenses and batteries and all the extra gear that people lug about with them. I wanted a camera that did great closeups and awesome colour, the two models I kept coming back to were the panasonic LX3 and LX5.. ouch on the price though. I managed to find an LX3 on sale for $200 off, I had lucked into needing a new camera the week that the LX5 had hit the market, and so LX3's were being sold off. Yay! not only did I get $200 off the camera, but I picked up a spare battery for half price too, and another SD card.

I love my new camera, it's a little bigger then my previous one, but it is still small enough to slip into my handbag or a pocket. It takes awesome photos! I love not having to fiddle with colour and exposure, I just point, click and load it straight to flickr, and with the grid overlay on the screen to help me when taking the shots, I barely even need to crop. Hopefully this means I will have even better looking project pictures on Ravelry, and more importantly, better pictures for my patterns for sale. Now all I need is a light tent/box set up, I am planning to build that from pvc pipe and white nylon.