Vile Worm (or 'A Warning')

It happens. You’ve been knitting a few years, you think you know a thing or two about colour choice, about the particular qualities of different fibres, about the behaviour of stitch patterns. You know all about gauge, about swatching; you are familiar with the inner workings of Ravelry; you can cable without a cable needles like it ain’t no thang; you are so confident in your ability to matchmake a pattern and a yarn that you occasionally daydream about setting up an internet dating service for the two (‘more couples happily knit together than any other site!’). So you choose a hat pattern, choose two contrasting colours, choose to unfurl your knitting smugly on public transport.

If you recognise yourself in any of the above, then Reader, BEWARE, because if my example is anything to go by, your knitterly pride is heading for a nasty fall. These are the perfect set of circumstances for you to create a TERRIFYING CYBER-CARNIVAL-SPACE WORM HEAD-EATER!

AAAAAAAAARGH!!!

Now, I don’t mean to denigrate the pattern: the designer’s photos of the hat look perfectly lovely, and Saz’s version of it (ravlink) is beautiful, but my version of it sucks! Oh my goodness, I can’t remember the last time I created anything so vile.  The sturdy garter stitch means it doesn’t slouch down like you’d hope a beanie would, but stands straight up, for a cone-head effect (seen above); my colour choice, which I envisaged looking cool and urban, somehow turned out garish and childish: in short, it’s just a vortex of wrong. I acknowledge that the lack of slouch might get better with blocking, but I’m not going to block it. If Sci-Fi has taught me anything, it is that when a mad stripy space-worm tries to eat your head, you do not give it a scented bath and leave it to repose upon a towel, you DESTROY IT, screaming ‘DIE, VILE WORM, DIE!'.

So knitters, have a happy, but vigilant, Easter. Make sure that hubris does not creep into your stitches. Check yo selves before you wreck yo selves.

Pointless

Despite my mother's early attempts to encourage me in the art, I never could see the appeal of cross-stitch. The patterns available were unfailingly twee - kittens frolicking amid damask roses and the like - and the end results seemed a bit, well, pointless. Making things, any things, takes a lot of time, but at least with knitting or sewing that labour is directed towards a practical purpose: this thing that I'm making will keep me warm, save me money, make me less dependent on flimsy shop garments, etc. Cross-stitch seemed to have no such purpose to recommend it. I mean, what could you DO with a bit of cross-stitch? If you like to think that you're too young to be tricking out your lavender sachets with natty needlework, what other options are there? Make a teeny tiny cushion for fairies to lean against? Frame it? Somehow a mass-produced cross-stitch design didn't seem worthy of the high honour of a frame - it would be like framing a paint-by-numbers painting, or a completed jigsaw puzzle. 

I think, though, that I may have been missing out, and missing the point. The point is that needlepoint doesn't need a point. There is a quiet beauty in pulling lengths of different coloured thread through fabric that doesn't require a functional end result to justify the doing. And, I have to admit, following one of the mass-produced patterns I was so sniffy about is pretty satisfying. I took the above photo in Yumchaa, Soho, and I could barely put it down to finish a tasty apple and apricot cake. I think I might get back to it right now, in fact!

Knitting a Tube, on the Tube

I have been working on my Here and There Hat (scroll down), in a manner suggested by its name: this is a hat that seems to ask to be knit in little captured bits of time, here and there. Stacking rows of spongy gold upon vinous purple, pulling udon-like strands of Malabrigo from the centre of my squidgy yarn-cakes: it's a pleasant business. 

Since arriving in the capital, I have largely eschewed the tube. I prefer to use my two wheels and two quadriceps, and zip about on the face of the city, rather than tunnelling around under its skin. This means that every time I do take the tube, it feels like a bit of a treat, especially when my tubular hat-to-be coordinates so beautifully with the yellow poles of the Northern Line. 

Now if I can just perfect the art of knitting while cycling...

A little bit Loopy

Let me lay some background on you: I have moved to London, on a semi-demi-permanent basis. As I haven't got a place of my own yet to stay, I brought virtually no possessions, just a couple of books and a capsule wardrobe. Well, 'capsule wardrobe' might be overstating things: I brought all t-shirts, pants and socks clean at the time of packing, and a motley mess of jeans and skirts. Anyway, the past few weeks have revealed two terrible gaps in my small collection, making my capsule more of a crapsule.

Gap #1: Any footwear vaguely appropriate for snow.

I feel like an under-equipped 19th-century Polar Explorer, tramping about Arctic South London tundra shod in a pair of pitiful plimsolls, alternately dodging snow foxes and frostbite.

Gap #2: Any knitting stuff. Any at all. I went without a wip, nary a needle, sans a single skein.

But why? A couple of reasons: the yasteroid has taken up residence in a Chinese cedarwood chest in Edinburgh, and it looked so cosy in there it seemed a shame to disturb it. Also, the creative dry-spell I've mimbled about on here before is not entirely over, and I am still disorientatingly less enthused about knitting as I once was; it makes me a little sad to look over my blog archives and see the volume of woolly goods I used to churn out. 

Since being here, though, my chilly fingers have been itching for some stitching, and it seemed foolish not to capitalise on the capital's treasures. So it was that I found myself inexorably drawn yesterday here:

Loop might well be my all-time favourite yarn shop. It has such an awe-inspiring selection, spread out over two floors, of lots of stuff that is difficult to get elsewhere in the UK, as well as supremely tempting notions, and the best button collection I have ever seen (which reminds me that I need to make a pilgrimage here one day, if I'm ever in York). Its embarrassment of riches always makes it embarrassingly hard for me to choose: I really would have been happy going home with any one of their yarns. So I bought two:

Yarn cakes fuelled by cupcakes

I think part of me thought I might transmogrify into a brand new 'London' person upon moving here, casting off (ha) all former interests and suddenly starting to seek out underground 'gigs', and art exhibitions in abandoned tunnels. As Socrates keeps telling me via tube posters, 'the unexamined life is not worth living', and there is much about being in a new place that has made me question several old certainties. 

Equally, though, there is a great comfort in doing familiar things in unfamiliar surroundings, and super-squishy Malabrigo Worsted has to rank as one of the most comforting yarns in the world. At the moment, pulling loops though loops of wool from Loop is a great help in stopping me going loopy.

Snow snows

Like divine dandruff, snow snows outside my window, sometimes in lazy, downward spirals, sometimes in frenetic horizontal streaks, sometimes in whirlpool swirls and curlicues. It is distracting me from all I meant to do today, and is a right white blight on my plans for another two-wheeled London adventure, but it’s so pretty I don’t mind. 

Also, now that I have followed them southward, I am free to wear the mitts I knit whenever I can get my hands on them (and in them). 

From Edinburgh Mitt Love

I have just finished these fingerless mitts and sent them off to their southerly recipient (with some regret, as it’s starting to get proper Baltic here in Edinburgh). I started them on one of the grimmest bus journeys imaginable, and these little guys kept me company through ten toiletless hours. The basic pattern was this one by the Purl Bee, but I quickly tired of the 2x2 ribbing. Perhaps I should have been alerted by the name ‘the purl bee', that this was a bee who favoured the simple pleasures of the purl stitch above fancy fripperies; who, indeed, may not have been capable of designing far beyond the basics of knit and purl, being a bee. On the other hand, what if the bee could hold a tiny knitting needles in each of its six insect-y legs – what then could it not do? Anyway, I decided to throw in a little freaky free-styling with cables and slip-stitches. The challenge then was to try and match said free-styling on the second glove – a challenge which I absolutely failed at: these are some mismatched mitts. But then, hopefully that just lends them a charming hand-made uniqueness? Yeah? Yeah.

I made my mitts in  Dream In Color Smooshy in the colourway 'Chocolate Night'. I highly recommend this yarn (which I think I got here) - the yardage is fantastic, it comes in a number of beautiful semi-solid colours, and is a real sturdy workhorse. The one downside for the British knitter is that as an Australian merino dyed in America, it’s far from virtuous in terms of yarn miles, but as an environmentally-unsound treat, I think it’s ok. The colour is pretty similar to the colour in the Purl Bee photos, and indeed to that I made my Evolution Mitts in all that time ago (which seem to have gone missing. I suspect my mother - the hand model in these photos. I swear that woman is building some sort of a woolly fort with ill-gotten knits of mine). I really was sad to see these hand-warmers go; I’m writing this in a charmingly petite French café in Stockbridge, and imagining that these might be just the sort of mitts that Amélie Poulain might have worn to ward off the Parisian chill. Perhaps I shall make another pair for myself, and magic loop ‘em both at once to ensure identicality. Hmm.

What’s on your needles, readers? If there are any readers?

Well, hello there

It's been a while, hasn't it? Ah, blog, you have been gathering sad cyberdust, while I have been falling in love, dropping out of my PhD, moving back home, trying to stop my mum ironing my pants, cutting my hair, getting tattooed, going on medication, buying bigger pants because they are so crisp when they're nicely ironed, repeatedly trying to read 'Moby-Dick', learning to ride a motorbike, and, indeed, doing a fair bit of knitting...

 I think it's about time we became re-acquainted.