FO Friday

Look! LOOK! Finally, I have an FO to get off my damned sidebar. If only I were like the inimitable Aileen and could promise you an FO a week (except that, to my tender ears, that sounds much more as though I were promising you a fuck-off every week instead of a decorous and ladylike knitted garment. Who makes up these abbreviations, anyway?)

But after a year on the needles, I present, FINALLY:

FO: Debbie Bliss tweed biker jacket

Pattern: Debbie Bliss biker jacket, from the tweed collection (capital letters not included: this is a high-end English product, and capital letters appear to have been banned for all aspirational brands across the water.)

Yarn: Vintage Sunbeam Lux Tweed Canterbury alpaca/tweed aran mix, 500g; cuffs, collar and waistband knitted in Tivoli luxury aran tweed, 50% wool, 21% acrylic, 20% alpaca, 9% viscose, 100g. SO soft and snuggly, all of it. Here's the vintage yarn pre-knitting: the colour of it is truer here than in the first photo.

Needles: 5 mm circular for the body, 5 1/2 for the bands

Pattern modifications: Apart from not using the recommended yarn? But since when do I do that? I grafted the shoulder seams instead of sewing them up. And I am never sewing shoulder seams again, what's more.

Time sucked: Mensch, who can tell? I'm a year from cast-on to sewing on the last popper, but how long in total? I think knitting the pieces didn't take too long, back in the mists of last winter, but who remembers that far back?

Verdict

Oh my GOD, do I ever have a verdict! So much so, that you get BULLET POINTS...

• Yarn: the yarns are gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. Much, much nicer that the Debbie Bliss tweed, which has no alpaca and therefore is not half as fluffy. This Sunbeam stuff knits up into a really solid, cosy fabric, which makes the jacket much more structured, rather than a cardigan. Which is perfect, really. Look, here are the real colours again, even if the photo is silly and blurry:

• Pattern: NEVER, NEVER AGAIN. This is a commercial pattern from one of the biggest brands in British knitting, right? Then why the hell is it so hard to provide a schematic? There is none. None at all. And the finished measurements listed aren't at all sufficent to draw up your own.
  
  More, the finishing instructions were minimal. The sleeves ended up larger than the holes for them; my lovely lady friend, who is a tailor, informed me (through my tears of rage and fury) that this is standard for jackets, and that I had to gather the extra fabric in at the top of the armhole. Then, elsewhere on the net, I read that some people sewed the extra fabric along the body seams. Again, who can tell? I am not convinced about the sleeves as they are, I have to say. But then, it is a biker jacket, isn't it? they are supposed to be bomber shape, and funnily enough, this is precisely the season of the bell, billowing or slim sleeve, but most definitely not bomber jacket shape.



• Overall: It's a biker jacket! In fluffy purple tweed! It's butch! It's femme! It's a classic! It's utterly square and hopelessly out of fashion! It fits perfectly around the body! It fits weirdly around the arms! It's a gorgeous dense fabric! It's particoloured! It's... oh, I dunno. It's finished. The proof will be in the wearing, right?

Tiger Eyes. Or OWLS OF DOOM?

Urban lace!

Pattern:Tiger Eye Scarf, from Stitchin' Girl

Yarn: Rowan RYC cashsoft DK, 57% wool, 33% microfiber, 10% cashmere, in colour Poppy (197 yds per 50g)

Needles: 4.5mm random circular

Pattern modifications: I only did two edge stitches instead of three, to save yarn (silly, there was no need at all; the scarf turned out 168cm long blocked... or almost as tall as me. Hooray for lace!) Also, I did the grafted version

Time sucked: A week.

Verdict

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I should have given you an AFTER picture fresh from the blocking pins, lace in its optimum glory. But I ripped it from its pins the second it was dry and danced out for a night in the boozer through the mists. That's how much I love it. Lovely easy-ish lace, glorious snuggly yarn, fabulous bright colour. O luxe yarns, you tempt me so much. So much!

Mme. Tapestry slips shyly onto the needles

Oh god, GLOVES. So fiddly! Fingers! So scary! And goodness, Madame the Fancy Schmancy Tapestry Yarn. Metal DPNS wouldn't do for her, so I ordered bamboo ones, which she does deign to wear, but she clings and snags on the slightest roughness, whining softly at every fray. She is indeed soft and fluffy, but she is also sticky like mohair: tinking is a horror, and even knitting at the gauge recommended on the yarn label is a tricky business, because she is hardly plied at all, just loosely thrown together and hence incredibly splitty. Awkward bloody stuff. Bring back the nice technologically advanced cashsoft, I say.



Moreover, the colours are monumentally silly. Which is fine for accessories, I don't mind stripey fingers one bit. But seriously, friends: this is what Rowan would like you to knit from this yarn:



Now look, I am a vegetarian queer woman myself, and even so, I cannot possibly imagine ANY man sighing, "O, all I want for this autumn is a quirkily striped jumper in SOY silk, please, a bit fluffy round the edges, and if possible, with a darling fussy placket detail on the shoulder? And maybe some adorable sky-blue buttons? But who would design me such a gentle garment?"

I mean, I would be more than delighted were I to get scads of comments from genderqueer knitting men, all going, "Actually, I LOVE that jumper, and I'm knitting it in the PINK colourway, to boot." I just doubt it, somehow.

Kelly also asked me about the biker jacket, so here she is:



Sleeves set in (weary, frail sigh... that is a story for another day), zip awaiting my lovely lady friend's sewing machine. But my lovely lady friend is deep in the throes of designing my BIRTHDAY presxent right now, so the sewing machine will have to await her flash of inspiration. Speaking of which, by the way, here is an answer to the vexed question, "but what do lesbians actually DO?"



Sit around of a Saturday night gaily knitting, designing, reading the paper, and making a godawful mess of the living room, is the answer.

Snickets!

I finished the Snicket socks! And don't they look gorgeous?



Pattern: Snicket, from Magknits.

Yarn: Schoeller and Stahl's Fortissima Colori, in colourway Turf, 75% wool 25% polyamide

Needles: 2.5 mm Addi metal double-pointed needles; 2 mm DPNs for the ribbing

Time sucked: A week, I think. Standard sock obsessive length...

Modifications: Ribbing done on 2mm needles; toes done with a Kitchener stitch finish, rather than a simple pixie-toe decrease.

Persnickety

Oooh, these were persnickety. Very, very much so. I tried using the useful cabling without a cable needle technique promised by so many websites, but at this tension, a cable needle is easier. Four sock needles AND a cable needle AND two extra for the heels? And yet... and yet... I do love them. And I did love knitting them, in a self-hating way. I also have a fair bit of that gorgeous subtle yarn left over, which makes me cross: these would have been gorgeous three inches longer. Motivation to learn toe-up knitting!

Best knitting in public experience yet

I was sitting on the Luas (the Dublin tram), fretting over a purl stitch on the cable needle as we zoomed over the Nine Arches at Milltown. My tongue was stuck out in unflattering concentration when I heard a voice:

"Miss one! Miss one!"

I looked up: it was the ticket inspector, gazing at my knitting in awe and wonder. "Oh - just wait till I've done this, and then I'll get my ticket out!" "Oh no no, please don't!" he said, panicked. "I wouldn't want to be held responsible for you missing a stitch! Keep knitting!" And he walked off.

I did have my ticket on me, because I am a Good Citizen. But this is a useful trick to remember for future necessity, no?

And in other news...

I am flying through the neck and waistbands for my Debbie Bliss biker jacket. Yes, yes, I know: a biker jacket in purple tweed is as silly as it gets. But it's pretty damn queer, isn't it, at least?



Here is a (slightly glorified) closeup of the body yarn (a vintage eBay alpaca/wool mix) and the darker neckband (in Tivoli luxury aran tweed). A tiny colour variation between the two, a bit like a Siamese cat: and then each yarn with its own gloriously bright flashes of primary colour. I am going to love wearing this.

terrible confession

Here is a thing I have not yet admitted to you yet. Well, I haven't really admitted to myself yet. Being home in Dublin means being home with a vast, extravagant stash, a squiggly sad frog pile... and also a shameful pile of unfinished objects. A huge one, I mean. I think that now is not the time to admit to its full horrors. I think that I will introduce you to my little UFOs, one at a time, so that you do not think too badly of me.

Yesterday saw me revisiting Dublin's dirty old city centre, now furiously piling on the expensive makeup as fast as she can muster. I was wandering around Henry Street, and thought, Why not just look at the sale table in Hickey's of Henry Street? They're more or less rubbish, but they are the only yarn shop in the city centre that ever stock wool yarns, and well. You never know.

And look! On that very same sale table, alongside scary giant 400g balls of acrylic yarn, was some absolutely gorgeous mixed-fibre Tivoli aran tweed...



which cunningly matches a UFO that I have sitting around at home, i.e. a Debbie Bliss pattern for a knitted tweed biker jacket. I know. I know. It's ridiculously silly. But I ordered this amazing alpaca/wool purple tweed yarn on eBay, and it just seemed right at the time.




Sadly, the yarn ran out before I could complete the whole jacket, but what remains to be knitted are the cuffs, neckband and waistband, which can be done in a contrasting colour. Originally, I thought I'd do them in Kureyon, for full-on boho craziness. But this yarn matches almost exactly, and is almost too close in colour - in some lights it looks almost identical to the original, in others about two shades darker. Now to hope, of course, that the jacket actually fits. I am not sure that I'm really a biker jacket person, and Debbie Bliss patterns, stupidly enough, do not have a schematic, so I'm not even sure of the shape.

***

Oh and by the way: that looks very like a respectable Snicket, doesn't it? Now for number two.



I am deriving ridiculous comfort from my Jaywalkers as the weather grows colder, and can't wait to own more handknitted socks. Yes, I have a sad, sad life. I know.