Handmade Fashion Photoshoot

Myself and some of my knits are to be featured in a spread on 'Handmade Fashion' in Varsity Newspaper. It did mean hauling the yasteroid around Cambridge, which has grown considerably since I first documented its existence, and is now about the size of Malta. I almost took along my current project - a jumper knit in the round on circular needles - but I was worried that wouldn't look like knitting to most people, so rustled up a pointless garter strip to use as a prop. I'm rather pleased with the photos, taken by the talent Edward Quekett - this one features my Irtfa'a shawl, and Forecast cardigan. I can't wait to see them in print!

... and this completes the Shipping Forecast.

Hooray!

Forecast is finally done! I cast on for this during a long car journey between Madrid and Bilbao, and knit the majority of it quite quickly. Then it lurked about in button band limbo for ages - I knit and re-knit three times and it's still not perfect....

I can live with it, though. I learned to knit back backwards, and cable without a cable needle, which made bobbling and cabling much less obnoxious.

The yarn is Rowan Scottish Tweed Aran in Thistle, which is quite rough to work with but softens wonderfully with washing. The depth of colour is glorious, with little blue and pink flecks, and it makes the cable pattern look like grapes on the vine.

It has turned cold again in the 'bridge, so I have been wearing this with pride.

Thanks to my friend Patrick for taking a million photos of me, and then taking a million more when I realised that one button had been undone throughout (see above).

Stitches in time (and bouncy castles)

I have been listening to Anne of Green Gables on audio book as I knit my Hey, Teach! cardigan. This was one of my very favourite books as a child, and I have been amazed at how much detail I have remembered. Equally, however, I am definitely appreciating new things about it... I doubt I picked up on the knitting content first time around, for example! The book starts with a woman knitting, and I have just come to the part where Anne goes back to school, and is welcomed back thus:

'Sophia Sloane offered to teach her a perfectly elegant new pattern of knit lace: so nice for trimming aprons'

It feels appropriate to be engaging in an activity that would have been so familiar to women and girls at the time whilst listening to a story about them. I'm not sure whether Anne herself, or non-fictional versions of her, would always have enjoyed knitting: I have read about children being made to sit and knit a certain number of rounds on a sock before they were allowed to go out and play. Nevertheless, it was a common currency of knowledge which, as 'Sophia Sloane' shows, could be shared and passed on, and it is nice to think that I too can participate in it. I suppose I do not have the same need to knit that Victorian women did  (my legs may still be warm even if I do not knit myself stockings), nor quite the same uses for it (I have yet to experience the urge to trim an apron...), but I bet they paused every now and again to stretch and admire their work in exactly the same way that I do.

I wonder if, conversely, they glowered at things that did not turn out quite the way they had envisaged? I have been doing so at Forecast. I did what I was talking about, and ripped out and re-knit the button-hole band (on the left in the picture below), picking up fewer stitches, which I think now looks just about ok. The button band, on the other hand, which I had previously thought was perfectly passable, now appears flared by comparison. I decided to block it, and see which side looked better. I'll keep you posted...

In the meantime, here are some things I love about Cambridge:

The de-stressing bouncy castle that the college erects every exam term.

I've passed this poster in the pigeonhole room a few times, and finally got round to photographing it. In case you can't make it out, someone has taken the time to modify its message to 'Do you think you are an academic?'.

Button it

Here is one of the things I have been grumpily refusing to work on.

This is the Forecast cardigan by that I treated you to a grainy close-up of a while ago, and as you can see it is oh-so-nearly finished. All I have left to do is to rip out and re-knit the buttonhole band because there is everything in the world wrong with it. This is maybe an hour's work, at the very most, but I keep putting it off in favour of newer, exciting things. So today I toddled off to John Lewis in the hope of re-motivating myself via the medium of buttons. I was looking for something small and rounded to echo the bobbles, and picked out these...

I was helped in my quest by a very nice shop assistant who was evidently very knowledgeable about knitting, but who had never heard of Knitty.com. My oh my. I guess because so much of what I've learned about the way of the needle has come from the internet I forget that there are a whole load of people who only use books and magazines. Now, I do have a lot of those too, but I have found online patterns to be so much more user-friendly. Perhaps this is partly an issue of space - it is more expensive to produce physical print than to publish something on the internet, so printed patterns tend to have space-saving, telegraphic instructions like 'Keeping patt correct, BO 7 sts at beg of next 2 rows. Dec 1 st at each end of next 7 rows, then on foll 2 alt rows, then on 4 foll 4th rows,' where by contrast self-published patterns can contain sanity-saving paragraphs of explanations, warnings or advice.  

I have gone a little bit button-buying-bananas recently.

The following used to be a fudge house. Now it is a button house.

Most of the little glittering treasures nestling in my palm above are from Loop, where I nipped into on a recent jaunt to London. I had been there last summer when I was staying nearby while rehearsing for a play, but I don't think I realised then the full extent of its awesomeness. It stocks a lot of American yarns that I hear about all the time on podcasts but very rarely get to see in person. This vibrant red Cascade 220 wool spoke to me from the shelf....

... it whispered 'honeybees and faggoting'. Which is, of course, a perfectly legitimate term in lace knitting. 

Sleeve me alone

Here is a Lame Webcam peek at the second purple cardigan I have been working on.

It's Forecast by Stefanie Japel, and much like Coraline has been languishing very near completion for some time. I find it hard to motivate myself with things that have been sitting around for a while. It's easy to forget where you left off in the pattern, which is especially problematic with things which are supposed to come in identical pairs, such as sleeves. I had to rip back the second sleeve twice in this case to get it to match its older sibling.