Nifty Knitting

I love knitting, and do a lot of it, but there are plenty of tips and tricks I am still learning. Yesterday I tried this for the first time.

I often add a crochet border to my knitting. This time I added a knitted border. That involved picking up stitches around the edge and then increasing at the corners. A little knitted facewasher or dishcloth was perfect as  test piece. And no I haven't woven in the loose ends or blocked it to make it look lovely yet. 

I'm planning to make a blanket or two out of my hand-dyed blue yarns. In fact a lot of the knitting is already done. I'm just working out how to put it all together and finish it off nicely. I think a knitted border will be part of the final design. 

Hot Hat

After the success of the black bunny wristies with blue trim. I decided to try for a matching hat.

I used the bunny yarn alone for the top, by which time--you guessed it--I was tired of plain black already. I added a strand of my hand-dyed lace-weight alpaca for the rest of the crown of the hat. I was pleasantly surprised at how much that little bit of blue lifted the whole thing. The other benefit was that it made for a denser, firmer fabric. Just right for a real hat structure. Then for the brim I dropped out the bunny yarn and used four strands of the alpaca to add the extra "pop" of blue. The whole thing is done in single crochet stitch (or double crochet depending which language you speak). I like the way it's holding its shape and I'm looking forward to how warm it will be now that the colder weather is here. What's more I have enough of both yarns to make a scarf to complete the outfit. More on that anon.

Blue

Life has been complicated and blogging ended up in the too-hard basket. Strangely, once I'd missed a few days getting back into routine seemed even harder. Anyway, here I am back again. I have been spinning and knitting as usual despite the long silence here.

One bit of excitement: Sussex Neighbourhood House is participating in the Coburg Carnivale yarnstorming of Coburg Mall. As if the opportunity to participate wasn't enticing enough, our theme colours just happen to be based around the colour BLUE. Funnily enough I was able to find a fair bit in my stash collection to contribute. I won't be doing a lot of knittting for this, but I did have fun with an extra large twisted cord.

It's late autumn in Melbourne, which means lots of grey skies, rain, rain and more rain. That's perfect weather for sitting in the armchair with some nice yarn. There are hats, wristies and a couple of blankets in the queue.

Subtle Colour

I've been experimenting with necklaces lately. I have some new tops which call for a slightly different length than I'm used to. I've seen several silver necklaces like this in the shops, but I wanted just a touch of blue for mine.

The test will be when I've worn it a few times, but for now I'm happy.

Easy and Blue

After a long day at the Market yesterday my feet hurt and I'm feeling tired. But I can't sit in a comfy chair without something to knit--it's a problem I have! So I've chosen something easy in one of my all time favourite colours to keep me company this morning.

It's one of my hand-dyes from a while back: a 5ply wool from Bendigo. I'm planning a little shawl and I'm not sure how far the yarn will go. With a simple triangle like this and the change of season upon us, just about any size will do.

Blue Blocks

Tidying up the Studio is high on the to-do list. I got started on that task yesterday afternoon. After a little while I felt I should reward myself with a sewing project. As a bonus it would use up one of the piles of fabrics which I had sorted but not put away. Here's the result so far.

It's going to be a doona cover--continental quilt cover for those of you who speak a different form of English--so I've used the overlocker to put the pieces together. Now I need to press those seams and put the strips together. I found a big enough piece of hand-dyed cotton to use for the back. I'll admit, it's a funny way of tidying up, but if I can get the job finished I'll be two steps ahead of where I was.

Picot Edge

I decided on a crochet edge for this woollen placemat. It's 4-ply cotton which I dyed myself. And the simplest of picot patterns: just two double crochet stitches followed by a single chain to give the hint of a bubble. I've been enjoying the blue-green combo--all the more since it was frowned on in my growing up. Do you remember the saying, "blue and green must never be seen unless there's something in between"? Well here they are, and I do like how they look, so there!

. . . and the inevitable dog hair highlighted by my macro lens, oh well . . .

Still

I took this photo from the pier at Williamstown on Friday evening last week. As the evening light fell on the water, I was disappointed not to have my camera with me, but reassured myself that there would be other evenings and the water wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. There didn't seem to be much point taking the sort of shot I wanted with my phone camera. Despite my attempts at calm self-talk I found it hard to settle to the reality of no photos. I ended up taking out my phone and just having a go. This little red boat in particular caught my eye. I'd like to play with the colour gradations from the sky through to the shadowy water. That won't be today. My weekend chores are still undone and they're not going to go away until I put some energy into them. Perhaps I can hold this quiet scene in my mind as an anchor point through the day.

Rhythm in Blue

I'm nearly half way through this little lattice lace scarf and I'm finally getting into the rhythm of it. It's a simple enough stitch pattern, but the combination of a decrease on either side of a double yarn over just wasn't flowing smoothly for me. The left-leaning increase was specified as, "slip one knitwise, knit one, pass slipped stitch over"--that's three steps for one stitch. I've substituted "knit two together through back loop", which gives the same effect for the effort of just one step. I've also shifted one of the corresponding increases to the second row of the pattern. Now I've got a nice rhythm going with three stitches on every first row and four on the alternate rows and I'm happily zipping along.
I'll take this with me this morning, though I doubt I'll have time for much knitting. I'm off to pick up a minibus from the Council offices. I'm taking my Monday morning group in to the city to visit the Immigration Museum. Driving a twelve-seater minibus is a bit of a stretch for me, but I'm up for a new challenge. I'll have a little time before I pick up my passengers to get into the rhythm of the new vehicle.

Deep Sea

I caught up with my friend M at a quiet cafe yesterday afternoon. Normally this street in Carlton is buzzing, but the Football Grand Final was on, and people evidently had other priorities. I arrived a little early, and was happy to have a few minutes to finish off this wrap for M before she arrived. The knitting was done, but there were the inevitable loose ends to weave in. This is a tencel-acrylic yarn. The tencel gives a nice sheen which adequately compensated me for the absence of natural fibres. There were a few balls left after my teal blanket project. I've had a few conversations about naming the colour. I thought it was somewhere between a grey and a blue, leaning towards the grey. My friend R, who loves grey, said it was definitely a blue! M settled it by calling it "deep sea".

More or Less

Today's post is dedicated to the colour blue--more or less. I'm still trying to spin my way out of accumulated piles of fibre. Last night I had a look at another bag of wool tops. They were mostly shades of blue. I'd obviously put them together for something or other some time back--I'm not at all sure what or when. I decided to just go with the flow. I added a few more bits of colour to bring the quantity up to about 100g. Then I split up the colours; distributed them randomly in a pile on the corner of my big table and started spinning. Here's how it looks this morning: Everything from light pepermint through to purple--and I've just spotted a stray strand of red in the pic that shouldn't be there at all. I'll navaho ply this bobbin-full, probably tomorrow.

I was going to give an explanation of Navaho plying, since I fielded a few questions last time I mentioned it, but I got myslef into a total twist with words trying to explain the process. So I've deleted that paragraph and instead leave you with a promise to expain it another day.

Improvising

I've got to the whatever! stage in my cotton dyeing. This is the stage where the dyes are ageing, so I'm not sure how they're going to behave. At the same time, I'm getting overtired and more willing to just see what happens than usual. You could say that I too am ageing and not sure how I'm going to behave! Nothing too wild just now, but this skein has been fascinating me for a couple of days: To give you the orientation: we have a skein of cotton in a white icecream bucket. The skein is draped over a plastic chopstick which is resting on the edges of the bucket. Both ends of the skein are dangling in a pool of dye. The skein was soaked in some soda ash solution which had just a hint of the fuscia colour in it--just because that was the only soda ash I had mixed up at the time. The dye bath is a combination of the fuscia and warm blue and the resulting purple colour was not unexpected. From memory, I set this up one morning and then headed out to do something else. When I came home I found the blue was creeping up out of the dye bath into the upper part of the skein. It was less than a centimetre or so of the blue at that stage, but I decided to just let it go. Well, the blue just kept slowly creeping up, until the two edges met. Now I have the blue-purple combo you can see in the pic. I haven't rinsed it yet, so I have no idea how much of the colour will wash out and how much will stay. And I have no idea why the blue dye chose to go travelling and leave the fuscia colour behind.

Theoretically procion dyes lose their reactivity after 5 hours or so of being combined with soda ash solution, but I've found that they often maintain a bit of life well beyond that point. In this case there's no real risk of failure. Any degree of blue, pink or pale purple will be a nice contrast to the more intense colour of the rest of this skein. Even white would be ok. And I can always re-dye part of the skein if I don't like the result. I've got a lovely day of outings planned, so I'm not going to rinse it now. I'll just leave it for another day and wait for the surprise.

Another Cutey

My mind is full of so many textile tasks and possibilities that I don't know what to write about. So, rather than agonise over the complexities, I'm going to keep it short and simple. This fabric was the wrapping for a surprise gift I received the other day: Cute blue paw-prints. I love blue, I love my dogs, I love cute and I love receiving gifts. It's a smile all round. And I get to decide what to do with another fat quarter of irresistable fabric.

And Blue

I'm waiting on a tradesman to arrive to finish off my floor. The story is turning into an epic saga! Hopefully today will be the final chapter and I can move on to the "happily ever after".

But, just to keep life interesting and textile, there is one more bucket of colour left from Sunday's workshop. It's blue:

. . . the bucket is green:) the dye is blue and the fabric has been soaking for two days now. I was a bit more ordered in the way I tied this one up and it might even turn into a class sample. It's fan folded in one direction and then rolled. I'll be keen to see how the colour has developed. The turquoise colour dye is the slowest to develop and it's been rather cold, so I'm hoping to get a halo of different blues around some of the patterning. But first I have to prepare to move all my furniture and boxes again, so the gaps between boards can be filled.