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.

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.