Gunpowder, treason and superheroes

Happy November! I love November. I get to wear lots of knitwear, I get to be excited about Christmas without people thinking I'm weird, and I love the way November smells. Is that normal?

Best of all, here in the UK, we get Fireworks Night :D Martin and I went to watch the free display over Poole harbour last night. I didn't take my camera since I was fairly sure I wouldn't be able to get any good fireworks shots, but I really really wish I had, because we were entertained by Bournemouth Carnival Band while we were waiting. 24 men, mostly a little on the chubby side, marching in formation....all dressed as Spiderman. Brilliant.

I also have a FO! The blog's been fairly slow on finished objects in the last couple of months while I've been working on Christmas gifts, but this one's for meeeee!

I was about 80% finished with my Dad's jumper by the end of October when my Mum rang up to say the measurements I was knitting to were wrong. I don't know whether she measured wrong in the summer or I wrote it down wrong from the phone conversation, but it turned out I was knitting about 5" too big, and since it was knit all in one piece with the sleeves, there wasn't anywhere I could steek it without messing up the stitch pattern. I felt like crying. I also felt like finishing it anyway and giving it to my Dad with a big tub of lard and instructions to grow into it. But, I ended up ripping it all out and starting again anyway. *sob*

In the mean time however, I took a couple of days out of my frantic Christmas knitting schedule to grumble and ignore presents and make something just for me. Stuff the consequences.

This is a Plaited Cable Cowl in Colinette Cadenza which I picked up accidentally in the yarn shop in Scotland. (yeah, the photos are pants, natural light is a bit non-existant today) I never really thought much of cowls before now, but it's very useful to have a warm neck without trailing ends while riding a motorbike. And yep, it kept me suitably toasty outside last night.

Back onto gift knitting for the next couple of months, but I'll try my best not to abandon the blog completely. The vast majority of my knitting is being kept secret from prying eyes :P, but there are still a couple of things I can show off...

Map of the World charts

Bit of a blog experiment today. Someone on Ravely was reading about my crazy obsessive recharting of the Vogue Map of the World afghan and asked if I could put my new pattern online (the originals are painstakingly drawn out on graph paper). I've never charted anything in Excel before - not for public use anyway, I've never converted a Microsoft document to a PDF, and I've certainly never uploaded anything to be downloaded by others, so I have no idea if this is going to work at all. So, Marni (and anyone else who's interested), please let me know if this works properly.

Knittingwise, I've done about 1 and a third of the charts and I've just finished embroidering the first complete panel.

Yep, all those colourful little blobs next to Australia are the individually french-knotted island clusters of Polynesia. They don't show up on the chart I'm afraid, the whole point being that they would be smaller than a knit stitch, so you have three options

a) Find a map and go insane trying to get them as accurately placed as possible (In the absence of an atlas, I've found Wikipedia pretty useful.)

b) Forget the map and just embroider them on willy-nilly. Go crazy. Make pretty patterns. Maybe spell out some secret message in morse code.

c) Do the sensible thing and ignore the islands completely.

Ok, the original pattern is available online at Vogue, and my new charts - fingers crossed - should be downloadable here:

Map of the World Edited

FO: Candy

I finished my jacket :D It's not perfect - I was working from my own gauge so I really should have made more of a plan before I started knitting, and I changed things and made them up as I went along - but I'm pretty darn proud of it anyway. I was mildly hungover in this photo - that's what I'm blaming for the slightly confused expression. The plastic furniture background has to be blamed on my camera, which spazzed out and over-exposed EVERY OTHER ANGLE in the garden. Hey ho.

Pattern: Based on Candy, before being fiddled around with a bit.

Yarn: 100% wool bought from the Knitting4Fun stand at last year's Woolfest.

Modifications: Well, since I changed yarn weight, pretty much the whole garment, none of which I have notes for. I added some short rows around the back and shoulders to bring the neckline up a bit, and finished off with a couple of rows of pink before casting off.
The ribbing at the bottom edge was too small to meet in the middle due to my impressive grasp of what negative ease actually means, so I had to rip back and replace it with stocking stitch with some increases over my hips. I didn't knit enough ribbing on the bottom of this bit, so if I wear it unzipped it flips up at the back. Rats.
Finally, and again because it was a little too small without, I picked up along the edges and knit a band to give myself an extra inch, and decided on a zip rather than risk it straining and gapping around buttonholes. It is...not as easy as it should be to guess how long a finished zip band is going to be when you're deciding when to cast off the main body. Makes it somewhat awkward when zips only come in certain lengths. So yeah, it's a little longer than it should be and makes weird angles at the top and bottom. Who cares. I shall wear my first finished jacket with pride anyway.

(and the next one will be better thought out)

FO: Oliver Theo's Baby gifts

I have decided that I love making baby garments. I am going to start locking all the couples I know in cheesy lurve boudoirs until somebody else gets pregnant.

These are all knit in Rowan Extra fine Merino DK, which I think is discontinued now. Dang. I'm sure they have something similar though. The cardigan is based on Daisy, done in 2 row stripes (which I LOVE, no more ends to weave in!), with a moss stitch border added at the end.


The leftovers went into Seamless baby booties...

...and an improvised top down hat. I did initially start with a bottom up hat with a roll up brim which was fairly stupid as I used so much yarn on the brim that I ran out of green while I still had a bald patch sized hole to fill in. Top down makes much more sense. Plus my hat has a nipple.

*snigger*

Lulworth Castle

The Boyfriend and I spent last Sunday at Lulworth Castle catching one of the last summer jousting shows (*GASP! We left the house! We went outside and saw real life people!). I think I must have been spoiled by castle trips as a kid because Lulworth is rather heavily restored and I kinda feel cheated if a castle is more pine floors and plaster and double glazing than teeny spiral staircases and massive holes everywhere. Perhaps that's just me. Having said that, we had great fun on the outside of the castle. We wandered around the animal farm while waiting for the show to start, where among the pygmy pot bellied pigs (very cute, but rubbish at posing for photos) and many many peacocks, they had angora goats...

...and llamas.

...Or possibly alpaca. I couldn't find a sign and I don't know the difference.

We also had a go at the archery which I thought I was doing pretty well at when I had two arrows on the target and Martin was still shooting clouds and grass, but then he got into his stride and shot it three times in succession. Smug feeling gone. Dang it.

And then, at 12 o'clock, the knights!

who wore shiny lamé 'armour' and had heroic hair!

and galloped toward each other with big sticks!

and rode backwards and occasionally upside down on their horses!

and thwacked each other with wooden swords!

The blue knight is the bad guy by the way (obviously, he doesn't have Hero hair), but he got kicked in the balls at the end of the routine, so everything turns out for the best. It was horrendously cheesy and utterly utterly brilliant. Worth the price of admission by itself. Martin now wants me to make him a knight costume because he is 12.

In other news, my uncle emailed me a few days ago to say my cousin Laura has popped and she's given birth to a gorgeous baby boy called Oliver Theo. I finally got round to sewing the buttons on my cardigan yesterday (it had been sitting buttonless for about a week after sewing in all the ends annoyed me enough to shove it in a bag and forget about it), I've made some matching booties and today I'm finishing it off with a matching hat. Oliver's the first baby in the family and my first opportunity to knit baby clothes and they are soooo adorable. I keep catching glints of terror in the boyfriend's eyes when I squee over them.

Angus disapproves

Meet Angus the Angry Squid. Angus is 2 months old and lives in the wilds of Hamworthy. He likes curried eggs, America's Next Top Model and singing opera in the shower. He dislikes everything else.

This is Hansi Singh's Squid-a-licious pattern knit in leftover Cascade from my stripy jumper for my darling boyfriend (he was the advance guard, to make sure Martin's bedroom was liveable before I moved in)

The pattern is great - I bought 4 of hers and will at some point get round to making another one for myself - the only change I made was to stitch down a little ridge between the eyes and chain stitch on some eyebrows.

New additions to the sock drawer

Originally this was just going to be a post of my completed toe-up socks, but then I finished my Jaywalkers yesterday, so I have twooooooooooo pairs! Woohoo!

I finished these just before I moved, just very plain vanilla stocking stitch socks in Regia 4ply Surprise Colour. They're my first toe-up socks, using Amy Swenson's Universal Toe-up Sock Formula and they fit perfectly round the foot, but the short row toe is kinda huge, so I don't think I'd use it for anything with a stitch pattern. My cast off is a little too tight too, so I'll use a sewn cast off next time.

My Jaywalkers are made in Noro Kureyon Sock, a gift from a Monthly Adventures swap. I like the pattern, but not too keen on the yarn. I love love love the colours, but the quality isn't great, much the same complaints as I've read from other people about Noro yarns. It's very scratchy to knit with, though it does soften up considerably after washing, and the way it's spun or...plied or...something (yeah, I'm not a spinner) makes it very tight and prone to twisting up in my hands. I managed to snap two needles while knitting these socks. Oh, and I found a knot halfway through the second sock which was tied to the wrong colour in the sequence. Gah. Shame Noro do such pretty colours. I guess until I can afford the lovely handpainted luxury sock yarns I shall stick to nice practical cheap (machinewashable) Regia.

Just a quick note about the new pair of socks I started last week. These are Cut & Paste socks in more Regia (bright, bright red Silk 4ply this time), and the toe on these starts from Judy's magic cast on. This technique is GENIUS. That is all.