There is a hole in a sock in my house!

Yes a hole. Yesterday my youngest cub announced that there was a hole in her favorite pink socks so she solved the problem by putting a pair of commercial socks underneath. Clearly while she knits she is not yet a knitter who recognizes that holes are bad things and must be fixed. Darning that sock has now been added to my to-do list, along with knitting the grey band around the sheltand yarn blanket, finishing the cat mittens for elder cub. There are new toys in my house .... some fibre from a scrappy swap which I totally forgot to photograph, and a new vintage mechanical pencil that is so pretty I want to write every thing in pencil, and a neat magnifying glass.

Socks with holes are not allowed. This is a fear of mine, that if I use yarn with no reinforcement there will be holes, so I tend towards yarn with nylon in it to avoid this very thing - and so far my strategy has worked. Oh there have been holes, perhaps 2 others to date, one in a bamboo-wool blend sock, and the other in the first pair of socks I ever knitted. These socks date from January 2009 - so I guess I should be happy they have lasted so long on a growing 8 year old. The problem may just be long nails - trimming those with this cub is always a battle involving cajoling and bribery. I can't blame the yarn totally, and they are as she said her 'favorite socks', so have been worn often.

In those times when I need to knit and not really focus on my knitting - and there are more of those than I'd care to admit, I have been knitting on the blanket shawl in shetland yarn. The grey garter border grows - slowely, but this is a nice peaceful mindless knit.

Last night I finally returned to my other wip's, or at least one of them, the Cat Mittens by Jorid Linvik. At the end of last night there was most of the third cat, sans tail. Some how charts such as this with different patterning every round seem too difficult for busy times - but then as I knit I realize that charts are not as demanding as i think they will be. Now I have reminded myself of that I should continue to work on these and have them done soon - except we have a weekend away. We are to visit my brother in Christchurch and as we are driving up and back I will need car knitting, portable knitting, and this is not that project.

Monday when I arrived home I found a lovely surprise, well three surprises on the doorstep. A vintage pencil to match my Burnham fountain pen, it isn't a perfect match - but close enough for me. These vintage pencils have 1.1mm lead which is stronger and seems smoother than the modern 0.5mm pencils, and the vintage one has a nice heft and smoothness which feels nice to use.


The second parcel was 140g of spinning fibre, an amazing mix of colours, as the result of a scrap swap I signed up for. I totally forgot to photograph the fibre - but I will next time. I'm curious to see what the others in the swap do with their mixes, singles, two ply, or Navajo ply. The third parcel was a little back ordered item from the Auckland Map Centre. Some time back I found a Lumagraphy magnifying glass in a second hand shop, and it was fantastic but the light was a little unreliable. I googled and found modern versions and ordered one, this is a 6x magnifying glass with a powered light which just makes things easier to see. The light also functions as a torch. I bought 3 of these, they were so cheap, that I figured they would be in use and claimed - and I was right. Bear has already taken one to work and asked for one to give his brother as a gift. This one is mine - I'm not letting it stray far from my work basket.

so ... no post this weekend,
enjoy the sun - or what ever your climate brings.
knit some ... rest some ... laugh some
na Stella

Getting things done,

There is a particularly nice feeling that comes when something one has promised to do, or something one is obligated to do is finally done. Those obligation-tasks never seem as exciting, never as inspiring as other self selected projects. This week I finished two of the tasks that hung over my head, with deadlines, the first was the Wall hanging gift/charity project which needed to be away by the 12th of October, and the second was a seemingly never ending pile of essays by first year students.

Both are done, done, done, done, and ready to go, leaving me with more interesting things to work on.

The wall hanging is now done, all I need to do is hand it over. This was finished on Friday night, and blocked on Saturday, in the small portion of the day where we had sun and warmth. Like all colour work it wasn't completely flat when it was first off the needles .. but unlike most of my colour work this did pull in a bit in the middle. As I knit this using a different manner of knitting (Andrea Wongs two colour method) I really didn't mind the pucker, in fact I was surprised at how little there was.

Most of the distortion was at the edges, giving my wall hanging a waist, not ideal. I also noticed that I might have to practice how to twist in a colour at the edge of a colour work section - my intarsia skills do seem to need polishing to get the tension and lay of the yarn just right.

But any lace knitter and colour work knitter will tell you that blocking is a wonderous transformative method for improving knits. So I blocked, I ran blocking wires along the loops on each edge and pinned the knitting out square. I noticed that the inner band of the garter stitch boarder needed a little help to stay straight so I ran blocking wires up those stitches as well.

Now it is dry and flat and neat and tidy. I think this is the way up it should go, with bubbles drifting up - but there has been discussion here and it looks equally nice the other way up - with bubbles floating down ... or even sideways, with bubbles floating off to the side. I will leave the final decision up to those that hang them.

The other finished obligation is the pile of essays - all marked with a page of comments to go with each. I decided this time to mark using a fountain pen, and to select a nice ink, this time saddle brown by Diamine, but I have my eye on new inks. I've recently become aware of Lexington Gray by Noodlers, which is a close approximation of graphite, yes that is right, it is a fountain pen ink that looks like it was written with pencil ! That is seriously cool for a geeky knitter like me. I've also fallen in love with Diamine Pumpkin ....... which I am going to have to order(scroll down here to find it, but there is a much better image here of it in use and being tested, but I'm not sure if non-fpn members can view it). There are I'm afraid at the present time one mechanical pencil and two fountain pens on their way to me somewhere in the global mail system, and while I wait for them to arrive here in my far flung corner of the globe ... I find my time looking for inks that will suit those pens, and there so much choice, 80 colours of Diamine and the stories behind the Noodles are enough to make me want most of them. I wonder if they can be used to dye yarn?

Despite my best intentions

to clear my needles of existing projects before starting anything new I still managed to come away from Saturday with a new project on my needles. Saturday was KSG - Knitters Study Group, and the topic was shapes. I took with me a selection of yarns and needles and tossed in a spool of linen just because it caught my eye. The shapes were squares, triangles, circles, hexegons and octagons. One suggestion was made, that it would be a good idea to swatch in cotton and then the swatch could be used as a wash cloth .... I started thinking that swatching in the linen would give me a basket liner for bread or muffins. Do you see what happened? There I was having decided not to start any thing new until at least some of my WIP's were off the needles and I just 'had' to cast on a new project. So today I introduce my new project, and showoff progress on my current main project. Today there are no new pens, or inks .. but I may have ordered a 1950's perfectly matching pencil for my Burnham fountain pen ... just may have.

The wall hanging has a 'required by' date of October the 12th, that is the date by which the one transporting them to Wellington is leaving town, so that is the date by which the work must be done. I am well on the way to finishing it. There was however a little boredom kicking in, knitting the same few rows of offset dots over and over - even using a new method of handling the yarn was tedious .. so I've started to bubble-out the dots a little, with fewer per line and more space between them as if they were floating away. I saw some of the other projects finished on Saturday and many included the name of the person they were for ... a fairly easy way to customise the project and something I may yet add.

And the new project? Here, not much to show yet, the first section of lace is done and I'm about to work the section where the star points are created. I'd love to fill the space between the points with eyelet lace or some other lace pattern .. but for now it is on hold as I finish the wall hanging in time to make the deadline.

Tomorrow I'm back to work, marking my share of those essays, but tomorrow night is spinning night and there is knitting to distract me .. so I'll cope. Essay marking is always a swinging emotional field, tiring, and at times inspiring when they get it, and then brutally demoralizing when they don't.

take care
na Stella

Daylight saving

Last Sunday we set the clocks forward for spring daylight saving, you know spring forward, fall back? Now instead of it being light when I wake, it is dark, a small change but a significant one, I know that in less than a month it will be light when I wake again, and that the longer twilight evenings are worth every minute of morning darkness - but for now, my body is out of sync, I'm not hungry at meal times, and I'm not sleepy at bed time, and its dark when I wake up. I have been on leave this week, and I thought I'd have lots to blog today, but as the last post was Monday, and today is Wednesday there is not much knitting progress to show. I have been working on my Peruvian knitting technique, and making changes to the design for the wall hanging so there has been frogging, there is almost no progress on any other knit project, but I do have new and old things to share. The last installment of the Vintage Purls Winter 2010 Sock club arrived and it is pretty, and two vintage fountain pens arrived, and a vintage pencil, and I have ink in colours I never knew that ink came in. Ink can it seems be as exciting as yarn.

So as this is a officially a knitting blog, first I'll write of knitterly things, the current work in progress (WIP) project and then the new sock kit, after that I can let the post wander of into non-knitting territory, and you can stay and read as much as you want.

New project, or nearly new project, the wall hanging. I restarted this, I had based the design on Kaffe Fassett's 'Poppy's' but the 12 stitch floats were way to long to strand easily ... so I frogged and reworked a similar pattern but with a smaller circle. I also took the opportunity to rethink how best to knit a wall hanging, so I've added a 10 ridge garter boarder all around to keep the edges flat. I spent a wee bit of time googling yesterday, it is a word isn't it? Googling? I watched the videos of Andrea Wong knitting and found a few others on you tube that showed me a way to tension the yarn in my right hand, little things that I had not paid much attention to when watching Andrea in person. I also came across a few blog posts that detailed this kind of knitting and was impressed with this one, suggesting that those little cute hangars that come with socks (like socks need hangars!) are useful Portuguese pin substitutes. At the moment the knitting feels 'slow' but that is because I am having to think about where my hands are are what they need to do, when I look at what I knit in an evening I am pleased.

My other knit projects have been ignored, and I really should not do that, start projects and then ignore them. The Vintage purl sock kit arrived Monday, and I want to cast on .. but let me see, one part mitten to knit, one shetland blanket, one wall hanging, and one large blanket ... I really need to tame and finish at least one of those before I add another. Like all her sock designs this one is pretty, with interesting cables, this is part lace part twisty cable,and is in a lovely purple blue, and look another bead and more knitting stickies! The toe is shaped to flow around the cable lace ... oh I really need to make space in the knitting basket for this one, and soon.

With all the fibre and yarn I 'acquired' while away I can still be tempted by local offerings, not local fibre but stocked locally. This is pencil roving, so very very nice quality, Schoppel Wolle InSilk 70% merino and 30% silk. I have never had a wool silk blend this evenly mixed ... it is a joy to spin.

Added also to my spinning basket is a wee extra from Crafty kiwi, way back in May of this year we were both part of a fibre swap, and at the time he said 'opps I forgot to add the last thing'. The swap parcel was so full I couldn't think what he forgot .. but this week M who had been away to a retreat brought back the forgotten fibre. Silk hankies! Oooooo, wonderful, I couldn't resist just teasing one out to see how that worked .....and they really do look like hankies complete with a wee hem!


And now the blog takes a turn for the non-knitterly, the trip to the second hand shops on Monday was not as fruitful as I had hoped. I did score a lovely fine Sabatini Cardigan, no not from winter 08 - probably a spring collection some years before, but nice and it fits, Toby failed to spot any lego treasure. Not finding fountain pens is fine, as two have arrived in the post over the past few weeks. The top one in this photo is an unbranded one, with a 14K nib, from Trademe, refurbished and writing nicely, the second one is a refurbished Burnham #60 from Ebay UK, again with a 14k nib, but this time a stub nib, and so so smooth, and the last one is one of two pencils I bought from Ebay USA. These are Autopoint pencils and they use a 0.9mm refill, Bear has the other one. These pencils have a nice quality feel and weight and seem to be the perfect size and balance. Why vintage fountain pens, well ... Bear found his fathers pen and we identified it as an Wahl Eversharp Skyline, from the 1940's, his dads is just like the burgandy one with the gold striped cap - it is a beauty but needs some repair (a new sac and some nib alignment), then Bear he was generous enough to gift me a 1.1mm Conway Steward pencil that was either his mums or his grandmothers. I dug out my Parker 45, boring old stainless steel but with a 1mm italic nib which I have owned since the mid 1980's, and then found blogs like Daves Mechanical Pencils, and Carpe David. Oh the wonder of discovering vintage pens and writing tools over cheap disposable ball points, and of discovering inks in colours that I only thought fibre came in. I have only tried Damson, Saddle Brown, and Monaco Red so far, all of which are a world away from black, blue-black, and blue, and I can see that I need to try more, and perhaps even some other brands that are available here in New Zealand. I feel like I've discovered a world of networked pen-geeks, a lot like the network of fibre and knitting geeks I count myself as one of .... they have the same sense of generosity and sharing of knowledge that the knitters online have.

next post ... more knitting I promise, its KSG - aka knitters study group saturday, so there will be something to post from that. I'm not sure I'll be at Thursday night knitting, depends on Wee bear and the travel arrangements to collect her ...

take care
na Stella