Rebecca! How could you do this to me!

This is my first ever no-photo post, and it is just to say AARGH! Rebecca! How could you do this to me! For the very first time I am utterly let down by one of your designs! I love your wrap-style jumper. The body looks unusual but sexy and stylish. But the arms! The first time I put on the jumper, I had to put it on over my bra alone, for no t-shirt would fit underneath those circulation-destroying arms. And for a deep-V jumper, that's not a good look. Small body translated to neat fit on a medium me; small arms were like something from a bustle dress circa 1890, you know the ones that ladies had to be sewn into. So I knit a medium sleeve. Which just about met around my wrist, but I wouldn't swear that a t-shirt would have fitted underneath the armpit either. And now, I am finally after finishing a LARGE sleeve to fit on a SMALL jumper, and if it doesn't fit after knitting FOUR sleeves for it I'll, I'll, I'll make a hat of the whole project, so I will. BAH.

Oh OK, I feel guilty about not having a picture. Look! Conkers! Autumn is here with a vengeance, and where is my warm jumper, eh?

A long summer, with much learning therein

Oh, no. Another hiatus, and after I'd got my knitting mojo back, and all! I am so sorry, friends. In exculpation, here is what I have been doing this summer: finishing a book, going on holiday to Portugal in a heatwave, moving country to the England, and starting a new job. Is quite a lot, no? And my trusty knitting has been keeping me company - indeed it has - but my blogging ability hasn't really. I am indeed sorry, fine internet friends. Now that I am here, can anyone recommend any knitting shops in Yorkshire? Apart from the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate, that I know about, but O! November is a long time away, and I long to be stroking luxurious yarns before then. Please help!

So, I said I learned lessons, and the main one is: Yarn Will Be What It Wants To Be. Lesson one:

Variegated sock yarn is for socks

For real. Like My Fashionable Life says, variegated yarn for clothes is... tie-dye, and well, nothing wrong with tie-dye, but I am not fifteen. Hence, these glories:

Quite easily the most expensive socks I have ever knit, but so so pretty, and just look at that sheen! And utterly absorbing, utterly lovely to knit. Hooray for Cookie A. And hooray for not having knit a variegated skimpy vest that, let's face it, would have got divil the bit of wear this sad sodden summer.

And now, lesson two:

If Glampyre says a cardigan should be cropped, it should be cropped

You may remember my bulky cabled cardigan of yore. It's a Glampyre pattern, but because I was drowning in long smock tops, I decided to knit it long and baggy and... well. It started out shapeless, and I told myself that would be fine, because it would be a snuggle-up-at-home type cardigan. But then, the weight of all the extra wool began dragging it off my shoulders entirely, and I couldn't even get warm in it, because my poor neck was frozen. So last weekend, I finally bit the bullet and reknit it in small, with a couple of short rows, but otherwise much, much more according to pattern:

There. That's more like it, isn't it? Slightly longer button bands, no mixed colours, and snuggly warm shoulders. Chunky knits are in this winter, I believe, friends, so we are in LUCK.

Otherwise, there has been experiments in mitred knitting, which leaves me a bit baffled:

This is one colourway of Noro Kureyon. Number 170, to be precise. And people knit themselves jumpers in these nutso colours? I ask you. Anyway, mitred squares turn out not to be hard at all, but I'm not so sure about the end result. It's a cushion cover, and I'm sure it'll be snug, but well. Yes. Thanks to Radegund, anyway, for the kind gift of yarn!

And now, it's back to my real knitting obsession: sleek little knits for layering. O Rebecca, let me hear your siren song:

Too pink? Or not? The yarn will lead me, I promise.

FO: ravelled bolero

Or, you know, insert pun of your choice about shrugging or boleros here. It's done! Done! All nine inches of ribbing, done!

FO: Rebecca Bolero

Pattern: Bolero mit Lochmuster, from Rebecca 31, in the larger size

Yarns: Vintage Jaegar Langora, 70% lambswool 20% angora 10% nylone, in colour 353. It took 12 20g balls. Far more than I thought.

Needles: 2.5 and 3mm circs

Time sucked: A month. I wasn't knitting constantly, but still, 3mms take their time

Pattern modifications: I didn't knit it in merino? Also, I am incapable of picking up stitches to order, counting what was it? 366 stitches exactly along the outside edge? How can any mortal figure out what intervals to pick up at? I just pick them up, damnit. Hence, the ribbing probably flares more than it should.

Here's a back view:


Not the neatest lace graft ever, but it will do, it will do.

Verdict: Well. I got gauge all right, but angora is considerably less stretchy than merino, and it's quite a bit baggier than I thought it would be. When I think shrug, I think vanishing little confection, just hugging my shoulders; this has more the ease of a full-on autumn cardigan. So, on the one hand, I'm not that sure it's all that flattering.

On the other hand, even before I'd finished the ribbing, I was more than a little tempted to just cast it off and wear it a few days this week, such is the gap in my wardrobe for a fluffy brown shoulder-warmer this cool, unpredictable summer. It's perfect for the colours I wear. It's small enough not to look wintry, it's fluffy enough to look luxurious, I will wear it and wear it. I hope. Also, it's a Rebecca pattern, the second I've knitted, and they're just so nifty, you know? Here's the Eureka moment when I folded the blocked garment together...

and the polyhedron did become a jacket, after all! Like a miracle! It feels thought-through and properly designed, is what. And maybe some day I will put on half a stone again (probably, indeed), and I will still be grateful of fluffy fitting warmth around my shoulders, and in general, I'm pretty happy.

angora and lace - implacable enemies or a lovably mis-matched couple?

I've been away, and back, and away, and back, so sorry, no blogging! I was even in Nuremberg in the pouring rain, and tracked down the yarn shop five minutes after it closed. That was sad. I could even see the latest issue of Verena smiling at me through the shop windows. No luck. No Verena or Rebecca for me this year, it seems.

But buying knitting magazines is only going to do bad things to my stash, and my stash is for busting, this summer. So first up: remember this springy Langora in an autumnal colour?

I decided that a Rebecca pattern was the way t magic it into a summery garment:



A wee shrug, because I didn't know the yardage of the yarn; it's 280 grammes, which seems quite little, but then again it's 14 balls, which is quite a lot. So I decided to err on the side of safety.



Evidently I am wildly conservative, because that's two balls there, and it's the guts of a sleeve. I suspect the whole confection will take 7-8 balls, which will still leave me some stash to bust. I may even have to swap some of it... then again, can one ever have enough baby-soft chocolatey cardiganness?

The prevailing wisdom says that angora and lace don't mix, because the yarn is too fluffy to show any pattern. This is a pretty simple pattern; what do you think?


The yarn is very unstretchy, presumably because the fibres are short, so I'm not sure how it will block... but it's all a brave adventure, right?

a discreet flash...

Like the quick flick of a raincoat. Or something. At any rate, today I am going to flash a teeny tiny selection of my stash, but one that makes up most of its bulk. Namely, a certain eBayed burgundy aran yarn...


There it is. Plain chunky aran, in burgundy. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing particularly right with it, apart from the fact that I do have roughly a sturdy 600 grammes of it, so easily enough for a proper jumper. I bought it on one of my many, many eWhims, which generally take a hold of my fluttering fingers the second I see "pure wool" and "crazily low price", no matter how much yarn is actually on offer nor what weight it is. In my defence, I was also labouring under the delusion at the time that aran weight was the same as worsted, and hence the ideal weight for a jumper. But what I meant was, of course, DK, and now I find myself obsessed with a gorgeous little DK cardigan from Verena magazine:


Cute and elegant, no? Though obviously I'm not about to be knitting stuff in grey. But it is definitely a DK knit, and that aran is just too chunky. So...


There's this Rebecca jumper, you've seen it before. A nifty modern aran, and I love that nipping-in cablework at the waist. But the shoulders, although set-in, are still majorly sloppy, and if I altered the neck to a scoop neck the way I would prefer it might be even sloppier. Hmmm.

There's also this jacket from Verena magazine, which is distinctly different, and definitely chunky (though I would spare everyone the bobbles.) But once that tweed biker jacket is done (it needs a sewing machine taken to it, and I am terrified by the very sight of them), will I really need another chunky handknitted jacket? Or even a sloppy handknitted jumper? Wo. I am just much more into light, elegant, discreet knits in DK right now... but without the yarn.

In better news, I have just one ball of the Kilcarra tweed left, which should, I hope, be enough for a silly matching hat for the scarf, and the Tiger Eye scarf is zipping along. Just in time for the next suit outing? Who can tell?

hooray! MORE YARN!

Because that's just what I need, man. Yesterday, I met up with the lovely Neelia for the first time ever, for a high-powered fast-paced raid on Fadeninsel, the best yarn shop I have ever seen in Europe. Neelia was nearly overcome at the lusciousness of the yarns on display, but did recover a little when she realised the high acrylic content of most German designer yarns... I still haven't got a photo of Fadeninsel to show you, but I must do. It's a cute little shop in a funky, very Turkish neighbourhood, a shop run by sharp-eyed women who anticipate your needs before you've thought of them. Yesterday, the woman in charge was kind enough to speak (flawless) English to Neelia and switch to German when talking with me, which is an attention I liked. Usually, service personnel and many other Germans I encounter here either have no English at all, or are so pleased at the chance to practice their English on a native speaker that they don't let me speak German. But not in Fadeninsel!

I shall not report the extravagances of the lovely Neelia, but look what I got:



Sock yarn! I've never made socks before, but now may well be the time. The yarn on the left is going to be made into leafy embossed socks, because it's all autumnal and all, and the yarn on the right - bought on sale! - is going to be my learner pair. Neelia suggests Jaywalker for the pattern, but I'm not sure yet.

I also got the new Rebecca magazine:



and got inspired by this photo. I have all this báinín aran yarn sitting around in Ireland, and have never been convinced as to what to do with it. I always think of báinín jumpers as being similar to Celtic armband tattoos and Sinéad O'Connor, part of the Oirish cultural revival of the early nineties, and more than a bit embarassing now. But a funky waist-nipped aran, with a scoop neck instead of the one pictured, might be just the trick. Hmmm. I have two weeks to decide.

Talking of decisions:



My lovely girlfriend brought me back this Fleece Artist yarn from the most amazing yarn store I have ever seen, in Toronto. I am so lucky. It is just luscious: slubby and rich-coloured and hand-painted and thoroughly, thoroughly North American. I so want to do it justice: there's 750 grammes of it, more than enough for a garment, but which garment? I've never seen patterns for anything this thick, and I don't want to make something that looks like a cropped sleeping bag. Any suggestions very, very welcome.

Oops, I laced it again

German knitting magazines are odd, odd things. You might know about Rebecca, the German knitting magazine that Debbie Stoller describes in Stitch and Bitch as being full of attractive Aryans frolicking on the beach, a snide but reasonably accurate description. Rebecca tends to simple-ish, classic designs that feature ggh yarns only, as it is the in-house magazine of the ggh yarn house. Rebecca also, I think, has a US edition, and hence an English-language following.

But there are others that are not translated, more obscure and considerably more mad. I am particularly fond of Verena, which is put out by Burda. Unlike Rebecca, Verena is not hampered by being bound to use the yarns of any one manufacturer; but still, I suppose, like any knitting magazine, it is bound to market the new yarns that are put on the market. And lord, the German market is absolutely full of crazy novelty yarns, in ever more unlikely combinations of synthetic fibres. Thus, Verena is half-full of creations like the one on the left, above, that feature more novelty yarns and plastic than you would have thought possible in one jumper, cost a fortune, and are of so astonishing a hideousness that they probably regularly feature on You Knit What? Presumably, the yarn manufacturers figure that, unless the wizards of Verena whip up a design featuring their latest crazy shiny sticky string, no-one in their right minds would buy it.

But then again, they also feature wonderful eccentric bohemian knits, the like of which you don't see elsewhere. So take, for example, the delicious little snacky jacket to the right, which, the blurb charmingly says, is designed for "desert princesses". Look at the gorgeous intricate lace! The plain-ish yarn! I have been ogling it for weeks, and yesterday... I fell. I didn't just fall into knitting yet ANOTHER lace project for myself, no; I felll into, for the first time ever, buying the original yarn specified for the project, at full price, Schoeller and Stahl's Scooter.

And lo, I suppose that the yarn manufacturers have a point, for I certainly would never have dreamed of buying this rather odd yarn otherwise: 64% cotton, 27% viscose, 9% polyamide (the colour is true in the photo of the ball, but not in the photo of the lace). It feels and looks a bit like carpet pile, with a golden shiny polyamide thread running through it, and whoever thought of designing a lace pattern with it? But I'm enjoying knitting it up, and, erm, have achieved quite a lot since yesterday. Whoops.

Thus, my friends, a double sin: not only have I not started knitting scrumptious little baby dresses with the cotton, as I said I would, but neither have I finished sewing Soleil. There is a reason for it, though: it needs to be finished with a crochet edging picked up and knit along the armholes, and no matter how I google, I cannot find instructions for how to do that. Perhaps I will have to give in and ask the Livejournal knitting community for advice; or perhaps I'll figure it out on my own somehow after all.