The Oh-my-god-I-must-be-freakin'-insane project

Obviously the huge pile of current WIPs from the last post isn't enough for me because I'm planning to embark on the most ridiculously complicated project I've ever considered. I've been listening to the Craftlit podcast recently - audiobooks are very good for handsewing I've found - and Heather mentioned that she was working on Vogue's Map of the World Afghan (actually she mentioned this in a podcast from about 3 years ago - I have quite a bit of catching up to do). I wanted to see what it looked like so I looked it up on Ravelry, and yes, it is an entire map of the world charted in blanket form:

And then I discovered that Vogue Knitting have it online for free and I started thinking about it. I'm not sure why, I don't even really like how it's styled. I like the bright colours in the countries but I think it's kind gaudy in the edges, and I really don't like the points and tassels, but I couldn't get it out of my head for some reason. Aaaand then I started looking at suitable yarn substitutes and found Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed as a perfect British alternative. And then I was kinda sorta looking up how much donegal tweed cost, just to kill time you understand, and I found out there were a lot of shades recently discontinued and now on sale on various websites for about half price, and, well...I cracked.

Yup, that's a LOT of yarn. But to be fair, this is probably going to occupy me for about 10 years, so a complete bargain really (off topic, I was saying this to my boyfriend as I was paying for it and he said "you know, you really don't need to justify your yarn purchases to me". I am going to marry this man*) The colours are a leetle bit brighter than the picture, but not quite so obnoxiously luminous as the original. The pack of natural coloured yarn at the front is for the edges, and I'm going to leave off the points and just finish it as a rectangle with a non-curling border. Of course, now that I HAVE all the yarn, I won't be casting on a single stitch for at least a month because

a)I am overcomplicating things slightly. For a normal, sane person, this is a great chart, but...err...I have a tendency to get a little...anal about detail. I could see straight away that I wasn't happy with the shape of some of the countries, Britain and Italy for example, and in a few places they'd lumped smaller countries together, for example, they have Central America as one country rather than eight. As I've started going over the chart I've found some really strange mistakes. Not only have they stuck countries together, they've split countries in half. They have actually added fictional borders into this map. I don't understand why they would do that.

Yeah, I know, this makes me crazy obsessive.

b)I'm in way over my head here. I don't know how to do intarsia. I don't just mean I've never done intarsia, I've never done fair isle, but at least I know the theory behind it. I have absolutely no idea where to even start with intarsia. It scares me slightly. Nice simple project to start off with then.

c) Oh yeah, and there's the other 11 projects already on the go. Best start knitting faster.


*No Mother, that is not your cue to buy a hat.

A hat! And a scarf! And no cold weather to wear them in!

I have housemates! They all moved in while I was up in Scotland, and while they're all very nice people and it's great to have someone to wander off to the student bar with, I'm still finding it highly odd to hear other people's voices in my house. They're all very impressed with my knitting too, which may have been a large factor in their earning my approval. Shelly, Emilie and Polly have all asked for knitting lessons. The boys haven't. Yet. I know they're just yearning to throw off the shackles of gender-based repression though...

My stripy cartoony jumper, though I was zipping through it at my parents, isn't going to be finished for enrollment tomorrow because I spent about 3 days casting off the hem so I'm now only halfway through the first sleeve. I'm using the 2x2 sewn bind off from the Vogue knitting book, so although it takes sodding ages, it doesn't have the chain along the bottom and it's a lot stretchier. I think I might unpick the neck edge and re-do it like this.

FOs though! I finished Thorpe about 3 weeks ago with some RYC Cashsoft from Get Knitted. (I like ordering from Get Knitted, they send you biros and lollipops in the package. Whee! Free stuff!) I decided it desperately needed a bobble on top, but apparently I've forgotten how to make them properly and it ended up so dense I could probably use it as a tennis ball.

I also finished My-So-Called Scarf before I moved but it only just got unpacked from my cold weather boxes. How can I forget about something this soft and yummy?! I feel unworthy. Malabrigo is just gorgeous. Smells bizarrely vinegary though. (Well, it did, now it smells of Persil Silk and Wool Wash)

And also, because obviously I am knitting so fast that my current yarn can't keep up (haha), we went yarn shopping in The Wool Shed in Oyne, where I displayed my stereotypical womanly ways by losing where we were on the map both on the way there and the way back.

Mum: Don't worry, we're taking the scenic route.

Hannah: We're in Scotland! It's all the scenic route!

These are buttons. Yes. They have no purpose yet, but I'm sure when I find it, it will be magnificent. They are from Touched by Scotland, a craft shop next door to the yarn shop, which sounds incredibly cheesy but is actually full of Very Very Nice Stuff.

Manos Silk Blend in 'A Shot in the Dark' for a lovely scarf, though possibly a short one I have to pin together with a brooch. Hmm.

This is...err...a stolen photograph of Jitterbug in Raphael, because my skein went into my slightly-less-accessible yarn storage before I took a photo and I'm too lazy to take it out again. For someone who previously didn't see the point in knitting socks, I seem to be developing something of a stash.

Must. Knit. Faster.

An update! A REAL update!

I'm a little late on this. The entire world has now forgotten about Woolfest, but I've only just unpacked my yarn from my many many moving boxes so I shall inflict it on you all now anyway (oh, I'm sure you are backing away from the screen in horror).

I took a grand total of...no photos in Cockermouth, big surprise, so we just have pictures of piles of yarn on my dining table instead. Hurrah! Somewhere, possibly on my mother's computer, there are photos of me wrestling a pair of giant knitting needles with which I managed all of 4 stitches, but it's probably a good thing I don't have these photos. The needles were about 9 foot long, they were very heavy, and there was much gurning involved in my manoeuvring of them.

I was very good at Woolfest. I had to be very good, because I only took cash. As in I only took cash to Cumbria. I left my cards in Bournemouth, so I'm not entirely sure what I would have done if I'd lost my train ticket home or something equally horrible. It was reasonably easy to be good, since the majority of the festival was fibre and I'm not a spinner (Mum is - she spent horrendous amounts of money on the offcuts of exotic beasties). Besides, I'd gone with specific garment projects in mind and most of the yarn stalls were selling variegated sock yarn rather than jumper's-worth amounts of solid colours. I did buy some sock yarn though. It was too fun to pass up. Only one though. I was good.
















Both my 'sensible' yarn purchases were from a stall called Knitting4fun (not at the same time - I had to umm and aah and then come back for more). This is a wool/silk blend for the Silk Ribbed Corset, hopefully, though I forgot to take my notebook with me so I have no idea if it's going to come close to the right gauge or yardage.
















These are pure wool for Candy, which Mum has promised to make me matching Fimo buttons for. Remember that Mum? I'm gonna remind you in like, 4 years time when I actually get round to making it.

















This is my fun yarn. See, I told you it was fun. It's Colinette Jitterbug in MARDI GRAS!! (I may have added the capitals and exclamation marks myself). As always, the photo does not do it justice, it's much more...glowy in real life. Especially the yellow, I could wrap the yellow around myself as a reflectivejacket. A very small and pathetic one, but a glow-in-the-dark one all the same.


I have new WIPs since settling (Ha!) in my new abode, mainly because I am a huge quitter and can't be arsed to work out the new sleeve caps on the red jmper.
















This is the first row of the Snapping Turtle Skirt. As far as I can tell it's going to fit me around the hips (yay!) but it is so far merely a Snapping Turtle Belt. I'm getting over my fear of picking up stitches though.





















This is the beginning of Mia, and is also an out of date photo. I took this two days ago (before I could be bothered to update the blog) and I have since knit about 4 inches of the lace back, decided it was too tight with twisted stitches, frogged it back to the sleeve, knit the entire back with nice normal stitches and started the second sleeve. I may even finish this. Woot.





I use brackets too much.

An epic guide to Lexington yarn shops.

I've been back 3 days now, and I have only just finished unpacking. My bedroom is a mess and my yarn box is now beyond overflowing, to the point where I have to give up trying to stuff things in and just resign myself to storing it in plastic bags on the floor. And in three months time I will be moving to a house with a smaller bedroom. Hmm. I get my own ensuite though, so maybe I should just give up washing and store my yarn in the shower?

Lexington, Kentucky has 3 yarn shops listed in the Yellow Pages and I visited them all. It was magnificent.

By far my favourite was Rebelle. The yarn is organised by brand and to a lesser extent by fibre content. It's only a little store but it's jampacked with stuff I'd never even seen online before. I played it safe this time though and only got what I came for - rainbow and black yarns for a stripy raglan in nice, basic Cascade.

Magpie yarns was an accident. I couldn't find it on the map when I was looking in the phone book, so I'd given up on visiting it, but then I stumbled across it when I was out buying embroidery thread. It's very spacious and the owner was lovely, but the yarn was organised by colour which I didn't really like. I did buy the Knitting Beyond The Edge book though, just because I couldn't bear to leave empty-handed.

The Stitch Niche (which they annoyingly insisted on calling The Stitch Nitch) was the furthest away - I have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea to walk there. It took me about an hour and a half. Bah. It was pretty big and well stocked though. About half the stock is synthetic and novelty yarns, but the other half is lovely, squishy, natural stuff. No price tags on anything though, very irritating. This is where I bought 8 balls of Berocco Suede. I know I told myself I would never knit 100% synthetic again, but I don't think I'd be able to find anything similar to this, and besides, it's for a skirt, and you don't want to go messing around with unsuitable fabrics for something hanging off your arse. I got 4 balls each of the light and medium blue for Norah Gaughan's Snapping Turtle skirt and had to bring it home in my hand luggage because my suitcase was stuffed with Cascade. Oops.

But I didn't stop there. Oh no. I went back to Rebelle for a couple of Interweave Knits (which I love, but can't get for a decent price in England), and found the 25th anniversary Vogue Knitting magazine in the clearance sale for $4. Over 60 patterns for £2! Bargain! I promised the cashier when I was leaving that I wouldn't be back because I had just broken into my last traveller's cheque and I knew my suitcase was already threatening to self destruct. The cashier just looked at me like she had heard that one a million times before. I assured her again that I wouldn't come back.

I came back.

This one needs back story. My first day on this trip was not a good start. Along with a scary hour long interrogation with the nice fellows at Immigration (I eventually managed to persuade them that I wasn't looking for a husband), and a cancelled flight that left me stranded in Minneapolis overnight, I lost my scarf somewhere in Gatwick airport. Yes, the stripy scarf, the grey and white one I can wear with everything, the first thing I knitted myself that I actually wore, is gone. I like to think that it was found and appreciated and is now keeping someone else's neck warm, but at the same time I have nightmares that someone thought it was a bomb and performed a controlled explosion. So, I need a new scarf (obviously all the other scarves I have won't do to replace it). And I've had the My So-Called Scarf pattern in my to-do list for years. And that green malabrigo I saw the day before was haunting me. It was so soft and squooshy! There's a reason this yarn has fan clubs. And dude! Green! I love green! I bought two skeins the next day, very sheepishly. I think it was worth it.

I went to America with $750 dollars. After all that yarn, 7 new tshirts, 2 pairs of shoes, birthday presents and the everyday essentials of food and vodka, I came back with 83 cents. I do not regret a bit of it.

Tune in next time to discover what I was actually doing in Kentucky (no, I didn't go purely to buy yarn).

Confessions of a Rapunzel hater

Ok, I have to admit to something embarrassing. A couple of weeks ago I realised why Rapunzel doesn't fit. If any of you have read the pattern, you will now that the moss stitch section is actually fair isle moss stitch. It's not in a pattern of any kind, just every other stitch, in the same colour yarn so I decided it was kind of pointless to go through the fiddly process of learning fair isle which wasn't going to be that noticeable. I just left it out. What didn't click in my inexperienced brain was that fair isle has lots of little threads woven across the back. Which stops it stretching so much. Which changes the gauge. Ah.

Boy do I feel foolish.

Mind you, what I said about not knitting without doing the maths first still stands, even with the shoulder seams in the right place, the sleeves are too long, something of a rarity for me. Once I pluck up the courage I will take it into university to attack it with the overlockers and pray it doesn't unravel.

On a brighter note, I had my hand-in today! Yays! No coursework for the weekend and my Christmas gift yarn has arrived from cnyttanpatterns.com. I've been very good and not even unwrapped the package for the last 3 days so I'm making up for it tomorrow by spending the entire day on the sofa knitting, watching DVDs and eating cake. Oh yes. It will be magnificent.

Mmmmmshopping

Last Wednesday (hmm, that was a while ago, not had a chance to blog in far too long) the uni took us on a fabric shopping trip to London to get samples for our design project. Since I plan to make all my costumes from cheapo fabrics bought from the uni and manipulated in the craft room rather than buying fancy expensive Soho stuff, and since the trip wasn't optional, I moaned most of the way there.

Until I remembered that there's a John Lewis on Oxford Street.

This is a Big Thing for me. We don't have any yarn shops in Bournemouth. Or, more accurately, we have about 7 (which I looked up on yell.com and wasted 2 days visiting), all of which sell plastic yarn and plastic needles. Not a single scrap of natural fibres anywhere near me.

So after trying not to drool all the way down the road, I dragged my rather sceptical, non-knitting friend Lucy up to the haberdashery section with me, and after LOTS of oohing ad aahing emerged with 11 balls of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Baby for another jumper I'm designing.
















Yom yom yom.

Once we got into the yarny goodness Lucy didn't seem so sceptical and eventually admitted that she'd quite like to make a scarf. I tried very hard not to bounce excitedly as I forced yarn and needles into her hands and pushed her towards the till. I thought she might be a little put off if she realised just how insane people turn once they catch the yarn bug.

Eventually re-appeared in the real world feeling elated, but also slightly ashamed of spending £50 on yarn (John Lewis not too friendly for a student budget), so to make myself feel better I went into Schuh and bought some new boots. I am the Queen of Logic. They were a huge bargain though, and so pretty, and they fitted my legs perfectly. I know that for a pair of boots with laces and buckles up the wazoo that was a fairly silly reason since I could just adjust them if they didn't fit, but having the display pair hug my calves like a second skin just felt like fate.





















I LOVE thse boots. I just went to take the bins out and got a wolf whistle from the builders over the road. Heh.

Spent the coach ride back teaching Lucy how to cast on and do drop stitches (she already knew how to do garter stitch but wanted something a bit faster). I've taught a couple of people to knit before but I always find it weird going slow enough to break down exactly what I'm doing. At first Lucy was having trouble holding the yarn and needles at the same time, and I realised that I picked my yarn so automatically that I actually had no idea what I was doing with my fingers, so I had to teach myself again before I could teach her! She's now itching to add tassels because apparently it isn't a scarf without tassels.

It was my cousin's 30th birthday this weekend so I went home to drive up there with my parents and to show off my new yarn and boots to my Mum on the way. My Mum has this wonderful ability to completely outdo my splurges and stop me feeling guilty by buying far more impulse purchases than me. Our study now contains - along with the yarn winder, niddy-noody, drum carder and THREE spinning wheels - a knitting machine and a loom. It is no wonder my Dad's going grey.

Photos!

So, now that I can actually get some photos online, here is the finished Tempting (hoorah!)



















I can't believe how big the pattern is, I did a size smaller than I usually wear and went down several needle sizes for the top and it still slips about like crazy. It looks navy but it's really a teal blue.

And then this is all my lovely yarn from the knitting and stitching show :D Very sorry if you don't have broadband, far too many photos for one post.













Mystery cheapo £1 a ball stuff, no idea what I'm gonna do with this, the white stuff is really odd, feels almost like raffia.













Lovely neutral coloured yarn for a scarf for my brother.













Bargain grey Jaeger merino wool, probably for a jacket of some kind.













'Black Watch' lambswool from Touchyarns New Zealand, which doesn't photograph very well but has bits of dark green and blue throughout it. Ooh, gorgeous.















More lambswool from Touchyarns, this one's for Rapunzel and did look a lot prettier before I balled it up, but is knitting up perfect all the same. I started knitting on the train up to Norwich to see my boyfriend at the weekend and managed to make a grand total of 5 false starts. I think I may have underestimated how long it would take me to get used to knitting from a chart. Thankfully it clicked into place on the way back and I'm now a few inches in and totally in love.

And finally, my second package from my secret pal, all with an underwater theme. Except for maybe the sweets.
















So, there is: 2 pages of fishy cartoon stickers, for sticking on windows I think...please correct me if I'm wrong before I go and wreck my glass, 2 pages of metallic fish stickers - I'm vaguely thinking about holding a underwater themed party to raise money for the conservation project in Mexico so they'd be good for the invites, if I don't do that (knowing me, I won't), I'll save them for a photo album when I get back, - a candy necklace which I'm eating as I type (in the proper fashion of course, whilst wearing it), and a tropical fish inpired ball of sock yarn, which is most likely to turn into a pair of gloves, so I can show it off without removing my shoes!

Right, I'm now off to knit some more of Rapunzel in front of the telly.

Yesterday was a gooood day. Firstly I went to the Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace and spent, um, £82 on yarn. Oops. Budget out the window a bit. Secondly Tempting got her first outing and received many a compliment from total strangers, and thirdly, I got back home at 7 laden with bags, to find a second package from my secret pal! This lot should keep me going for at least 6 months.

O...K... I don't seem to be able to put any photos up at the moment so I'll have to show off all my goodies next time. Nuts.

Just enough time for a great meme I found on Stacey's blog. Paste "(your name) needs" into Google and list the best 10 results.

Hannah needs...

...so much expensive care

...a home and a good daily walk

...to go into the tunnel and face the prisoner

...to apply lots of make-up so she can perform in her latest dramatic role

...to sleep now, she cannot feel her feet

...more than Taggert can offer

...an intermediate to advance confident rider who is gentle on the reins

...a little sister from China

...to be naked at all times, eats kebabs

...puppets