Cheer up!

Despite being almost June, it is miserably cold, relentlessly windy and the skies seem to be dark grey far more of the time than is reasonable. I've got an eye infection and a cold - which seems unfair at this time of year. And the search for a ginger kitten is going nowhere. I begin to wonder if there just isn't a ginger kitten with my name on him out there.

So I needed cheering up, and what could be more cheerful than a big yellow lupin and a lovely pale pink rose!



needlepoint Bag

Another from my albums this time. I made this a good many years ago and still use it regularly. It was a kit and a Kaffe Fasset design. It is a really good big bag - I use it to store yarn that I expect to need in the near future. I enjoyed making it very much and I still enjoy using it. Cushion covers are lovely but they wear out - this bag seems to go on for ever! It is lined with a heavy-duty calico.



Birthday Yarn Scarf - finished

I finished my birthday yarn scarf yesterday and it is beautiful. The pattern is Bluebird Lace Scarf by Kara Peterson.

The yarn was a strand of a yarn from  http://www.kingbecky.com/ put together with a strand of very fine silk yarn I already had. The kingbecky yarn is very discretely shaded - beyond the capacity of the camera to show. The result looks as if it has been made in a solid colour but the slight variations catch the light differently so it looks even better in real-life than in the photo!



Choosing yarn

When I saw the Dockside Cardigan pattern by Amy Miller in Interweave Knits Summer 2011 it struck me as a pattern my daughter would like. As her birthday is in the autumn it seemed like a good idea to make it for her. But, there was a problem - the yarn is not, as far as I could tell, available in the UK. Kind people on ravelry told me it is a sock yarn, but when I looked at alternatives available over here I couldn't find anything I thought my daughter would actually wear.

Yesterday, computer problems - now fixed by a kind friend - left me with some unexpected free time, so I dived into my yarn stash and looked to see what I could find.

I have a lot of coned industrial yarn, bought from a closing down sale of someone who was retiring. Industrial yarns have a lot of advantages. For one thing, even if you don't get them at sale prices they are usually cheaper than balled yarn. Then there is more choice. And, best of all, they tend to be thin so all sorts of combinations are possible. I even find that, being oiled, they keep my hands nice when I am knitting with them!

I looked out 2 yarns my daughter would like. The one on the left is a dark navy 90% lambswool 10% cashmere, but I didn't have enough of it. I also had plenty of a lovely dark slate (on the right) 90% silk 10%  cashmere.

I was tempted to use the dark slate, but the tension of the pattern was quite loose and drapey - which I knew my daughter would like.  If I used a yarn with such a high proportion of silk it would have no memory to speak of and would tend to droop rather than drape. Having thought about it, I put 2 strands of the silk yarn with 1 of the thicker lambswool and worked a sample.

Being oiled yarns, I had to wash the oil out before I could check guage and feel. The camera has struggled with the colour - it is much darker than it looks. But you can see how the sheen of the silk and the matt of the wool have worked to give interest to the fabric. The guage is spot on and the fabric has elasticity - it springs back when stretched - thanks to the lambswool. And it has the right lightness and drape. The only downside is that I will need to work the pattern in daylight to be sure of avoiding mistakes.



Roses

I love roses! The one above is gorgeous though it has the inconvenient habit of insisting on flowering only well above head height.

This one is a great favourite. It was in the garden I grew up in and had probably been planted about 1939. It is a climber but not impossibly vigourous and flowers profusely. The flowers start pink and pale to white.  We brought rooted cuttings of it when we moved here, only to find a beautiful specimen already in situ! The only other place I have seen it is in a garden in Scotland. As all seem to have been planted about the same time I suspect it is a rose that would have been very popular but for the interruptions of the war.

And this too is a rose - a wild rose. Isn't it amazing to think that this is the sort of thing that has been developed into the roses we have today!



Finished! - Knitted bag for tatting

I got the bag finished yesterday and I'm very pleased with the result.

I carried on with the lining and stitched the two layers together at the top of the drawstring section. I made icords and put them in. For the top, I increased in alternate stitches all round and worked to longer than the bag top. I cast off fairly tightly on the lining and fairly loosely on the bag as the lining had far more stitches. Then I matress stitched the two parts together. As the upper layer was longer and fuller than the under layer, this caused the seam to sit under the top and let the blue section blouse over - which was the effect I was aiming at.

Here is the bag with tatting installed, spare shuttles, scissors etc. in the pockets and the tatting and pattern in the centre.

As you can see, the bag has considerable stabilty - it is empty in this photo.

What I was trying to show with this project is that - once you understand how knitting works - you don't need a pattern for something like this. I started with a basic idea - I wanted a really special bag for my tatting, a dolly bag type, using a cd in the base as that is a suitable size. That really was all I started with - just a rough idea in my head. I didn't put anything on paper. And after the first 8 stitches to start the base I never counted stitches or measured anything in centimetres, I just worked until the base would fit the cd and the pocket flap would fit my shuttles - everything beyond that was just judgement - and how much of each yarn I had!



Colour!

I still need a little more time to get the bag finished, so here are a couple of poppy flowers and a rose bud from my garden this week.