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.   

A Close Secret

I love the windy closes that extend away from Edinburgh's Royal Mile like veins on a leaf. Their unassuming, dark entrances provide no clue as to what treasures lie beyond. I chanced upon this one on a wander while on the phone.

Dunbar's Close garden, off the Royal Mile

I had to draw on powerful reserves of altruism in order to blog about this peaceful plot of orderly vegetation; perhaps a secret garden should by definition be a private pleasure, lest it become, simply, a known garden. Not to be confused with a gnome garden.

Anyway, I highly recommend Dunbar's Close for those weary of foot or spirit - or those who entertain fantasies of being a seventeenth-century lady, taking turns about the garden before finding a sunny patch to do some stitching. 

Salisbury Crags

A little while down the Mile, the landscape in front of the Parliament ('here for tae represent aw Scotlan's folk') is provides a more dramatic background to my knitting. As for what I'm working on - that is a close secret too, for the moment.

A Day at the Museum

The entrance hall - note the sad lack of fish! The coin-dodging carp that used to take up much of this space were the main attraction of the museum for me as a child.

The National Museum of Scotland reopened this summer after a three year refurbishment project. As far as I can recall, the last time I visited it was on an ill-fated semi-date: the guy was a smoker, which I disapproved of, so I playfully hid his cigarettes in the Ivy Wu Gallery, which he disapproved of. Luckily there was no awkward games of hunt-the-tobacco when I went yesterday with my friend Alice - just lots of marvellous creatures and wondrous objects.

A massive prehistoric deer

A glowering T-Rex

An astronomically interesting room...

... replete with astrolabes and other other-worldly paraphernalia for measuring other worlds

A giant trilobite scuttling up a wall

Ptiny pterosaurs flapping overhead

There were details I'd forgotten I remembered from the museum's previous incarnation, like these beautiful Victorian radiators wrapped around columns. 

It was a super day; I will have to go back when I am less cold-y and more able to take everything in. Have you had any exciting days out recently? Leave a comment and let me know! In the meantime, I plan to curl up, drink cinnamon tea and knit my snuffles away - I hope you're all having lovely Sundays.

Plenty of fun to be had in the gift shop.

Creak

It's been such an horrifically long time since I last posted, I feel like the only news that would justify the silence would be something along the line of, 'I gave birth to twins, won a sea battle, and was additionally elected Pope'. Instead I have nothing of real interest to report- I've just been rather down over the past few months, and haven't felt much like knitting. Actually, that's not quite true - there have been a couple of abortive projects that I might share with you - but in general, I've been going through a real creative dry spell. This morning, though, I turned up 24 hours early for a breakfast appointment, and thought I might gear up the creaky cranks of the ole blog machine. I'm using my unexpected solitude to swatch for Vitamin D by Heidi Kirrmaier (not sure how to do the link on my iPhone).

Edited to add photo.