Yeah. I know. I know. And you know what? I'm not sorry. I miss blogging, don't get me wrong, but things just haven't been conducive to writing long, or any, entries.
So what have I been doing? Well, for the most part, knitting. Like all things that I show a modicum of talent for, I've become ever more obsessed by knitting. To the extent that I spend a lot of time on the internet (I mean, a LOT) and I'd estimate that 80% of that time has been reading through
TechKnitter,
Marnie Speak,
Knitty,
Twist Collective, and of course the wonderous one-site-to-rule-them-all
Ravelry. I'm fast approaching the event horizon of learning to spin and have begun a countdown to the time I can walk into that glorious, all consuming fibrepocalypse.
Speaking of countdowns. I've left my job. And David will be leaving his next month. Why? Well, we're moving to Denmark.
More specifically, to this place:
Even more specifically, eventually here:
And we're leaving next month! Around the 23rd of August. And once we've moved, I'm going to learn to spin! Hurrah! Everything has been pretty calm but jam packed. I've been stealing boxes off corners and visiting people left and right. I'm really sad to leave Bruxelles, but not sorry. Afterall, I'm starting to be comfortable in French, time to change things up.
Danish, I'm looking at you. Ten hot potatos in my mouth and three incomprehensible bonus vowels. *bends over*
Ahem.
I'm looking forward to being near to our Danish family, and also to having less traffic, pollution, noise, etc. Also: Eventually sticky-looking always-hugging babies. My allergies have been awful this past year. Absolute, 100% "yay-you-won-at-life-here-is-your-fabulo
us-grand-prize!" type allergies. Hives and asthma attacks and perpetual mouth breathing sorts of allergies. Hurrah. I'm kind of hoping that cleaner air will help reconcile my respiratory tract and sinuses with the rest of me.
Let's see, what else will we have less of?
Yes, let's!
And let's not forget Bruxelles' awe inspiring power of wtf. Allow me to give you some delightful excerpts of the marvelous experience that is BelgaLife. For starters, there's terrible traffic circulation issues in the city. BXL, like most old towns, grew hodgepodge out of some nebulous, mainly imaginary, locus and is now a roughly concentric set of mish mash city locations strung together by myriad surface streets in varying states of disrepair. Some places have room for cars. Others really don't. And there's more cars than there should be.
About four years ago, I was waking along Rue Le Beau, and I noticed that there were signs of construction going up around the steep curve in the road going under the bridge. As the years passed, I watched sporadic crews of workmen rip up the old cobbles, and erect their usual
"pietons --->" signs with the arrows pointing to the middle of the road (with no protective barriers, of course!). As is the habit of all Bruxelles' construction sites, the workmen customarily abandoned the place, dirt exposed, building materials rusting in the constant rain, for what I can only guess is a necessary aging period. They cordoned off one whole side of the already narrow two way road and made it a one way dealie for nearly a year. To top the whole thing off they moved the people-walking-out-infront-of-fastmoving-c
ars crossing area to the blind curve in the road, now conveniently invisible to both lanes of traffic!
Take that, you pesky pietons!
Imagine our mystification when a forest of totally inexplicable yellow flag poles turned up, on both sides of the road and bridge. Neatly arranged with little rotating flag-holding sections at the top. The road reached a fever pitch of activity with dozen strong work crews busily standing around meaningfully. Then one day there were blue flags with cryptic white lines and dots all over them. That was all. The crews and equipment disappeared. Four years of sluggish construction aimed at the highest possible level of disruption to narrow an already narrow, very busy, road, move a crossing into a murderously negligent position, and erect numerous yellow flagpoles.
Yes! Ok!
As for other sources of wtf, don't even get me started on the BelgaParades. That's for next post, if i'm feeling generous.
So, on to the Knitpocalypse! Right.
I recently finished this project:
The idea of this was to take my, pretty, shiny, luxurious silver Handmaiden Seasilk and knit up a simple, beaded shrug. Something that would benefit from the drape and shine of the silk. I didn't want to knit another shawl, but it needed to be something shawl-like. Silk is wonderful for flowing and clinging and ace at being glimmery, but structured, tight construction it does not make. The construction of this shrug is pretty clear. Essentially, you knit a fat rectangle, only a little wider than it is tall, and you fold it in half, long side matching long side. Then, you seam midway up the shorter side from the corner, not all the way to the top. Those holes in the side become your arm holes, and the top long side goes against your neck, the bottom long side against your lower back. This creates a draping, flowing silhouette, changing rather dramatically according to the measurements you knit to. The shape of it when you wear it is pretty much equivalent to the Blossom fold in origami.
Trust me, this is easier than it sounds, if you're not familiar with garment construction:
(Text: Dimensions are entirely dependent on what effect you'd like, you can knit this in either direction, depending on the stitch pattern you choose. Doesn't matter!)
(Text: 3. Seam these edges together. Now you have this shape. This edge is on your back, or lower back...This edge goes on the back of your neck. 4. Yielding this shape when worn...)
See? Not so hard!
Now, I wanted to knit it in lace, since I've been very much into knitting lace of late, and again, silk lends itself to lace patterns. I also wanted a tall shawl collar, since I find that flattering, and draws attention to my face rather than my chubby frame. I chose Elizabeth Freeman's pattern
Laminaria (since I love that pattern), and picked up her conveniently already-converted-to-rectangular pattern chart (Available on Rav) and got going. I did some knitmaths and after few false starts in which I calculated my gauge incorrectly, with thrillingly stupid results, I finally got into my stride and started knitting apace.
The shrug flew by. Since I wanted lots of sparkle I included 800 glass beads, merely highlighting the charts to show the places I wanted the beads to go. I just wanted to knit something simple, clean, and fun without too much stress, and so I refused to fuss too much about things that might have bothered me in a more taxing project. I even knit one too many repeats of the blossom chart and let it slide by without frogging it, despite it eventually changing the overall look of the shrug.
I was happy to see that I had plenty of yarn left over by the end of the main body, so I decided to knit lace sleeves. I converted the flat pattern into the round (a wee bit harder than it sounds, and probably more effort that I thought I would first expend, however...) and picked up stitches from the 'armscyes' (feels odd calling unshaped holes, armscyes, but I guess that is what they technically are.), knitting them up from there.
Now it was time to pick up the stitches and knit the giant, forever long K1 P1 ribbed collar, in the round.
Ok! So at this point, maybe I wasn't totally being honest with myself about it being a small, quick, project. After all, I had just picked up 226sts of 3ply fingering weight with 2mm addi lace needles, intending to knit about 15cm of 1x1 ribbing. (For those of you who don't knit, that is a LOT of boring. I mean lots of it. That is about eight hours worth of boring, spread out over a couple of days)
This was around a week after I'd started the project. Pretty quick knit! I was so eager to wear the thing, and the yarn looked so
good in the knit. Handmaiden Seasilk looks, well, almost metallic. It has this gleam that is very satisfying as the stitches slip by over the smooth barrel of your needles...
*gets distracted*
*looks pornily into the middle distance*
Excuse me! *coughs* Anyhow. I was approaching the end of my last round of ribbing, when I decided that I should go get my tapestry needle and get ready for the grafted bind off. I don't mind this bind off. A lot of knitters will tell you it is the kiss of living death, but I can be pretty patient. But still. I remembered reading an interesting entry on
TECHknitting about
a better way to do
tubular cast off. I headed over there, took a look at her instructions,and set to. I even developed a nifty trick to keep the graft stitches even and spacious so I didn't pull them too tight:
(What that is, is me using the third needle to form the grafted 'stitches' around. This is difficult to explain, but if you're trying to do this, then this will make sense, I promise you! )
Do you see how ratty that yarn looks? That's because I had undone this three billion effing times before I went ahead and started using the third needle as a sizing tool to keep my stitches even. And since this is worked with a cut length of yarn, that means I was drawing the entire length of one piece of silk yarn through each, and every, stitch. Ok now with this bind off, every four moves worked through the stitches on the needle equal one bound off loop. You do the maths. It took me four days of on again, off again, binding off to get this finished. Tedious isn't the word.
And then it was finished! And it was
too tight. There's a lot of self delusion in crafting. How often have you painted, carved, or baked something, and known halfway through that it was totally effed? A quick glance around ravelry will turn up a lot of forum posts of people desperately seeking confirmation that their projects are, in fact, not effed. More specifically, they are looking for confirmation that there is some easy fix for the effedupness they are beginning to suspect is unavoidable. Well, I knew this was effed. I knew it was going to be too tight. I knew it after I had done the same six, painstaking centimetres for the *nth time. But I
believed it would probably work out. You know what? There is no Santa Claus, Virginia. Believing that there is one when you don't have indulgent parents to sustain your delusions isn't going to get you a BMX come Christmas.
Saying I was upset doesn't come close to the feeling that surged through me when I tried it on. It was more a mixture of anger, resignation, and exhaustion. I put the needles down. I got a glass of wine to go with my whine. I knew what I would have to do, and it already hurt me. So much.
I undid it all, including about 2cm of the ribbing. It took me almost two hours. I cut off the old messed up piece of yarn, rejoined the ball, increased the n° of stitches by 20%, and knit a further 7cm of boring, 1 by 1 ribbing. This time, when I bound off, I just grafted the stitches together, no slipping stitches for a tubular bind off. I used the same method pictured above to graft. And it was right. It was flexible, it was floppy and drapy. It was Just Fine.
If I were to knit this again (and I most likely will, when I've had enough time to forget how painfully boring grafting 300+ stitches is.) I'd probably use some invisible elastic thread held with the silk to give it more body and pull, or I'd go down to a 1mm needle. It probably wouldn't help how soft the collar is, in either case, because silk is silk and it is never going to be a scuptural fibre.
Well. Ok, that is what is up with me. Hi!
---
(And around the time I started this post, I guess one part of my brain thought 'You know, I've been going through this door the same way for years now! Why don't I just give it a miss this time around and try going through the wall?!' And that's how I ended up spraining my middle toes. That one thought in my head must get pretty lonely! My toes still kind of hurt on my left foot, but it is much better. I am win)
happy
