Noro Blanket

Things have been a bit....everyday lately. Nothing dramatic one way or the other, just plodding along really.
Every couple of days we get a little glimpse of spring and all thoughts of knitting big warm sweaters go out the window, and then it goes back to grey and miserable and barely into double figures again. Which all in all makes it hard to know what to knit! I have a sweater amount of cotton yarn at my mothers house which I will only be able to recover next week for my big summer project, so in the meantime I'm spending a little time on a project I started back in the Christmas break: My Noro blanket.

It is made up of squares knitted in the round using random Noro Kureyon skeins I've picked up in various sales - Noro is a fun and interesting yarn to knit with, but rather expensive at full price for a quality that widely divides the knitting community. Kureyon is probably their most rough and ready yarn, but it felts beautifully, blending all those lovely colours into each other, and that is the idea at the base of my blanket. The squares are edged in Troon Tweed - a good, solid British tweed yarn that I have left over from a couple of sweaters I made years ago. I would probably have preferred to edge them all in the green, but I am trying to be frugal and stash-busting, so some of the squares will have purple edges instead as that is what I have at hand.

  

The blanket has actually turned out to be the perfect spring project: the
individual squares are small so don't feel to hot and itchy to handle in warmer weather, and I don't have to worry about finishing off a piece of warm clothing at the height of summer when I can't wear it :)

Manly Man Hat

Here's something I should have posted a while back but didn't quite get round to taking pictures of 'til now:

Marks Manly Birthday hat.

It was spun from this gorgeous, custom-dyed Bluefaced Leicester and Silk fibre from the endlessly helpful Marianne from Picperfic who put up with me changing my mind back and forth about fibre contents and exact shades of grey and amounts of blue acceptable for a perfect stormy sky and all my other pettiness.
The braid was so pretty when it arrived I barely dared to start spinning it in case I muddled up all the colours.

But spun it I did, and in secret too, as Mark was inconveniently off work that week so I had to try and squeeze it in whist he was sleeping, and knitted it up using the Exeter Hat pattern which was a very good, quick knit and makes for an smart manly hat.

Daybreak the 59th

aka Handspun Daybreak

Pattern: Daybreak by Stephen West

Yarn: 200gr hand spun Bluefaced Leicester fibre, hand dyed in light to dark gradient blue and yellow

This was one of my very first spinning efforts, and dyeing it too, for that matter. I think the colours came out a little too bright - the blue should have been more stormy grey and the yellow only goes dark golden right at the very end, but it was lovely to knit and oddly enough, it looks better on than it does when you just look at it. Maybe it's the contrast with skin tones or something. It's also very lovely and soft.

Having finished that, I've picked up another stripey number that I started on late last year. 

It is inspired by this kit from french shop Elle Tricote:

              Although the original looks fantastic in the Noro yarn, I had some lovely swedish yarn waiting to be made into something, and I thought the pattern would look nice in a more monochrome colour way. I also thought that the sweater would be more flattering for me with the chevrons pointing downwards. I couldn't find the pattern I had in mind anywhere, but with a little help from the magic of ravelry forums, we figured out how to transform a cardigan pattern into a pullover.

                    

What I've got here is a gigantic knit in the round square. Once the points reach my required length for the arms, I will add small triangles in strategic places and they will somehow form sides and seperate sleeves. Don't ask me how, but I'll keep you posted!

Cardiff Office Wear, Winter 2013

In my mere-mortal day job, I work as a designer in the office of a joinery. The building is unheated at night until someone comes in and gets the wood burner going, and it has an amazing capacity for holding the cold in! As a result, I usually end up putting more layers on when I arrive than I had on in the car!
This is my "First cup of tea in the morning" look:

 

Nonetheless, this all serves as a fantastic justification for my knitting, and yarn buying. The other day I realised that there was a freezing cold gap between the top of my socks and the bottom of my leggings under my jeans. A little bit of stash-busting and much 2x1 ribbing later:

Improvised Leg Warmers in Colinette Hullabaloo...I think the colour might be Fushia, there are a few that look similar.

 

I now have the warmest ankles this side of the Severn Bridge. And I'm quite impressed with how much I'm managing to knit from stash at the moment too.

Keeping warm

We're having a little cold snap here in Wales. Or rather, the media think we're having an ARCTIC FREEZE APOCALYPSE when in fact we're having....January.
Nonetheless, it was a good enough excuse to play with my Christmas present yarn.

Optimistic Mitts in Cascade Pure Alpaca Worsted - about 2/3ds of a skein

Buttons from John Lewis. I really wanted to use some of my many retro green plastic ones, but they were nowhere to be found! They're probably in a safe place so that they don't get lost. hrmph.

Alterations: worked a thumb gusset for a better fit and extended both top and bottom cuffs. Top cuff covers my little finger completely, leaving just the tips exposed.
Really easy pattern though, the mitts look really "finished" with the straps and the buttons even though it's simple to make.

Holiday knitting

I didn't of course just cook and run around after the cats picking up baubles: there was knitting to be done to all the musicals on telly!
I had saved one very special project to start on in the holidays: the quite mind-boggling Celestarium
There is currently a major KAL on ravelry for this shawl at the rate of 200 new messages a day, and I knew I had both the yarn and the beads for it in my stash!
The yarn is Wollmeise Lace in Old Blue Jeans, with some chunky silver beads, meaning that I can leave out the yarn-overs from the original pattern. Every single stitch in this shawl is charted, and I have reached chartS E, of which there are 4. Sello-taped together, they take up the width of our giant coffee table! Nonetheless, it's a perfectly easy knit as it is all stocking stich with the occasional bead to attach, and it is just stunning to watch it grow.

 

 

I also needed something demanding a bit less concentration, so I started reworking a Noro blanket I'd begun a few years ago and never got very far with as it consisted of large, dull, garter stitch squares. I was inspired by the Pop Blanket but too lazy to deal with the short row shaping, so I'm now doing centre-out squares in Noro Kureyon with a frame in Texere Troon Tweed that I have left over from my Sunrise Circle Jacket . I know both of these yarns will felt beautifully, so it should make a lovely proper blanket. This was my prototype, I have made a few more since then, and found some purple tweed from another project, so hopefully, this will turn out to be another entirely stash project!

Prototype

I have been approached to supply sock kits in Gower Wool to the lovely Welshgiftshop.com , so this week I have been working on a prototype for a pattern to go with the kit - just a super-easy, festive stripe which is knitted a little larger and looser to allow the socks to be lightly felted in the machine. I accidentaly felted my christmas socks from last year and they became the softest warmest thing on earth, so now I want to spread that toasty joy!
These knit up really really fast, I only cast on late Sunday night and have been knitting a little casually in the evenings...the second one is already on the needles.

On the needles...October

 


Great Big Sweater
Debbie Bliss Luxury Donegal Tweed - Chunky
An idea that started off as a grey poncho and became an oversized orange sweater instead. Working top-down, currently dividing for pockets, then ready for the bottom rib.