tidings of comfort and joy

I knitted a hat. It took less than a week. Which is handy because it snowed. Yes, in London. Before Christmas. It settled and everything (Don't believe Hollywood London: most years we have no snow at all).

It's supposed to be Selbu Modern, but because my normally abnormally-super-loose gauge gets abnormally-super-tight as soon as I do colourwork, it's more of a Selbu beanie. Which is at least useful for wearing under my bicycle helmet in the cold. It's also slightly square at the top, but that's due to rubbish blocking (might re-block on a balloon or something). Details of yarn, etc on ravelry project page.

Mince pies! Made by Kirsty, not me. Though the flaky-lightness of the pastry is at least partly due to me. Tip from one of my students: use vodka instead of water in pastry. Works really well. The mince pies were for a small Christmas party we held this afternoon/evening. Both Lara and Felix had to cry off ill, but we still had a house full (including Emms) of merry-makers.

Above is a before shot, some chocolate fruit cake (from Feast. Sounds wrong, but really, really works) surrounded by a pile of pfeffernüsse (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe), and lights draped over our staircase in the background. We also had gingerbread, dundee cake, goblets of mulled wine and about a trillion other things. Very full now. Signs of the remains are below. Season's Greetings to you all.

Damascene Silk

Yes. I've been knitting in the desert. Those are Roman remains in the background (Palmrya). The project is a top-down take on Rambling Rose. 

My baby brother's been working in Damascus this year, so my Mother and I decided a visit was in order.  The last family holiday together before baby-bro gets married in the summer. Mum and I flew into Istanbul then made the rest of the trip overland.  We explored Crusader castles, sacred churches and mosques (e.g. where St Paul had his sight returned), amazingly empty Roman ruins, drank minty lemonade and generally pretended to be Agatha Christie (we had coffee in the hotel where she wrote Murder on the Orient Express). I've put some of my favourite photos at the trip at the end of this post, but first: the yarn. 

After managing to avoid anything more yarny than spotting a lady knitting socks outside Istanbul university, on our last day I discovered a little store hiding in the spice souk of Damascus's old town. Surrounded by a heady scent of cinnamon, cardamon and freshly ground coffee were shelves upon shelves full of gleaming silk, all in the deepest, brightest colours. Plus, possibly the rudest shop-keeper I've ever met (though I suspect he was watching the shop for a friend, he seemed to care so little about selling anything). Above are some of the yarns I saw, these are the two I bought. 

I had just bought 3000m of cobweb purple silk from Fyberspates, but the aforementioned baby-bro wedding is set to be a giant Malaysian/Scottish triple-event extravaganza, so I've been planning a bit of a summer of lace as it is. 

Finish (in memorandum)

Three FOs, all l dedicated to the memory of Tony Hart, who died this weekend. I loved his TV programmes when I was a kid. Art and design via Tony Hart was always so calmly playful, it was about making interesting and beautiful things from stuff around you; exploring the world through shape, colour and texture. It wasn't about impressing posh people, following instructions exactly or being able to achieve measurable results. It was intuitive. It was creative. It was exploratory. It was fun.

Made for: Kirsty (housemate)
Pattern: In some ways it's Thorpe, but modified for DK weight and added bobble action. It similar to the one I did for Marcus last Valentine's but with more bobbles - which Kirsty says are very useful for attaching her MP3 headphones to.
Yarn: Wool-cotton in Gold.
Needles: 2.5 addi lace circ.
Ravelled: here.

Made for: Anthony (another housemate)
Pattern: Basic toe-up sock with stripes. I divided the yarn exactly (weighing on kitchen scales) and worked till I ran out.
Yarn: Cygnet Wool Rich 4 Ply (black), with leftover green of Trekking Pro Natura and Dream in Color Smooshy.
Needles: 2.5 addi lace circ.
Ravelled: here.

Made for: Marcus' mother, in exchange for a jacket she gave me rather than taking to the charity shop (clothes swapping is *so* the new shopping).
Pattern: Basic toe-up with extra embroidery.
Yarn: tea-dyed bamboo sock yarn, with some brown wool as contrast (again, leftovers).
Needles: 2.5 addi circ, my old one - too short to do them both at once, bah!
Ravelled: here.

I was going to spend the evening continuing the Tony Hart memorial by making Morph-like models with plasticine but now Woolies has gone, I'm not sure where I could buy some on a windy Sunday afternoon in Peckham. Instead, I think I'll just watch the Wallace and Gromit movie (Morph's greatest legacy) and swatch for my next project.

FO: Gold Rosa

I feel like I've not blogged in an age, and my last few blog posts haven't been exactly eventful. The various distractions of living with three other people, cycling and the new job mean I've had little time for knitting, let alone blogging about it. There has also been the usual pre-Xmas secret knitting, so expect another FO post in the new year.

For now though, here's a good-un. Backstory: a while ago, I knitted this beautiful jumper, but it was always a little too big to fit the idea of the perfect aran I had in my head. So I gave it to my mother who is just the cm or so bigger than me needed to make it fit like a glove (plus she didn't have the perfect aran idea in her head to deal with). In exchange she bought me yarn to make Rosa. 

Yarn: Rowan Wool Cotton in bronze. About eight and a half balls.
Buttons: Brown shell ones from John Lewis, I turned them back to front so you could see the flaws which were more interesting and gave more bronze colours which I like with the gold yarn.

Needles: 2mm and 2.75mm circs.

Pattern: Rosa, by Kim Hargreaves, from the Thrown Together collection. 

Mods: I used a slightly heavier yarn, but done a size down. To give it a bit more consistency, I did the ruffles in wool-cotton instead of the pattern's suggested kid silk haze. And because these much thicker ruffles looked like scary little worms at first, I sewed the tops of them down too. I rejected her vertical rib sections and went for standard 1x1 ribbing instead. I also added a couple of button holes, but that was accidental (knitting in front of the telly whilst also arguing about how much to feed the fish...).

Verdict: A very wearable piece, and that's about the most important thing, right? It could be smaller*, but the short-row and side shaping Hargraves is so enamoured by does its job - it flatters in the right places. If I did it again, I'd probably do clever things to mean there was less picking up of stitches and less seaming because it wasn't the most fun knit I've ever done. 

Ravelled: here.

*New Year's resolution. Stop knitting everything so bloody loose. Or at least wash all my gauge swatches and go down more than three needle sizes if necessary, no matter how ridiculous it might seem. 

There has been knitting

The yarn cake: product of the ball winder I finally decided to buy. Its amazing. Why didn't I get one before? Not only has there been ball winding, but there has been knitting. This is partly because I realised how close Christmas is, and partly because I took a few days off cycling to work*, thus opening up bus-journey time for the knit. The links below are to ravelry.

Rosa in Wool Cotton

Robot Hat (as socks) in various sockyarn

Arch-shaped socks in Smooshy

* The pause in cycling due to being HIT BY A CAR last week. Driver decided to illegally turn left and not look before he did it. Clever. I was very lucky, a few bruises, and the bike seems equally unscathed. I got straight back on the saddle, and have cycled into town several days since then, but I was a bit shaken up and stiff to manage every day.