UFOs revisited

Remember way back in one of my first posts my mentioning of the Pinwheel Jacket? It had been put on hiatus for a fair while, since about the end of january really. I found it was too hot to knit with a large lump of wool sitting on my lap, summer is not the season for a pure wool knee rug!

Anyway, I've picked it back up again. I have a number of assessments at uni due and an exam that frankly scares the living daylights out of me (I don't normally do well with exams). Mindless knitting that occupies the hands and not the mind is exactly what I need at the moment, and so I've recommenced work on it. To be honest, there isn't that much to do. I have 1/3 of a sleeve done and only 25 rows to go on the body, and maybe the i-cord edging. I'm not sure if I'm going to do that yet.

Besides, I bought a few books, and I'd like to have a warm jumper finished before I knit anything out of those. I'll review the books as soon as they arrive. I did buy them from Amazon.com so it might take a while. Has anyone else noticed that knitting books in Australia are absurdly expensive? It is cheaper to buy them from America and pay the shipping!

And a First! My first knitted object from my own handspun!

And here is the finished mini-scarf! I knitted it to use up a few skeins I had lying around, spun up from a samples set from Wendy Dennis of Tarndwarncoort, but I really wanted to knit them. I hadn't any idea how big it was going to be because I didn't swatch, check my yardage, weigh it, or even have a look at the wpi. And despite all that, it knitted up wonderfully!

The pattern is one I wrote for a friend of mine, Wendy. She wanted an easy shawl pattern that could be knitted till you ran out of yarn and she could put ribbons through. While it's hard to tell with this one after I blocked it to within an inch of its life, there is a border of eyelets up the sides of the triangle too. Hers is being knitted in a varigated red mohair. I might put up the pattern here if anyone would like it. It's easily adaptable, and I'm planning on knitting a bigger one with lace motifs all over it. And no, I didn't swatch the pattern either. She asked me for it after 10pm when I was amazingly lacking in yarn and needles in my vicinity. Either way, it worked!

Anyway, it's really not very big, It'll just go around my neck for stopping those irritating down the back draughts and it's the perfect size to go around my head. While I look like I just stepped off the Amish farm, it will stop my hair from getting singed while fire twirling!

Handspun!

Well, I've finally managed to spin yarn on my wheel that I'd actually like to knit. And the sad part is it's all in three different sized sample skeins, there's not one full size skein of any of the colours. However, they are all polwarth, and they're all the same weight.

So, while I've only got a small amount, I'm going to knit a small triangular scarf with them, starting with the smallest skein and going up to the biggest skein. The plan is even if it's small, I can where it around my kneck underneath a collared shirt and so on.

I'm looking foward to seeing how it goes! I'll knit while listening to my lectures again. It'll be very nice easy knitting. Yay!

Magic Loop part II

I can now say I have used the magic loop. I have even succesfully made a sock with it. Before morning I will have made a pair of socks with it.

I used leftover yarn to make some bedsocks so the socks don't entirely match, but they're good enough, because they're besocks and no one is really going to see them.

I'm also really glad I used leftover yarn from that pinwheel jacket because it means I've knitted the socks on 5mm needles, so they've knitted up damn quick... And so I can follow what I did on the finished sock as I made it up as I went...

I'm really happy with it, particularly the cast off. I knit socks toe up (I also learnt the figure 8 cast on. Learning ahoy!) and so my cast offs tend to be rather tight, but I made up the cast off as I went, using a half-remembered picot cast off and ended up with a really loose cast off.

Yay!

Magic Loop?!

Yeah, I'm writing this post at uni so it might be a tad premature, but I'm taking advantage of the wireless internet here.

That bobbin full of singles I put in the last post? It turned out to be one of the worst examples of my spinning I've ever done. It was underspun in some places, overspun in others ect. However, all is not lost, ladies and gents! I do indeed have a use for it! I only hope that i have enough...

I have discovered that I have trouble getting to sleep at night without bedsocks as I'm too cold, so I'm going to knit that lovely coloured yarn up into a nice pair of bedsocks! I also suffer from second sock syndrome, which is the reason I have made a single pair of socks to date, so I'm exploring the magic loop method.

I've a large number of reviews that tend to basically say this technique blows, but it's looking rather easy to me so I'm giving it a shot when I get home with some spare yarn...

To come: my experience with the Magic Loop? Is it really Magic, or a simple Fraud?

Recent activity

I have been rather quiet on the blog front as of lately. Partly because I've been busy, and partly because I've been battling the computer (There's a reason I christened it Hades).

My knitting:



I'd been having a great deal of trouble when I was using the bamboo (as mentioned in the post below) but these are the knitpicks (yes, I know you can't see the needles, but the photo's from a mobile phone!) and they are simply wonderful. The stitches slip along them easily, the joins are smooth and don't catch on the silk, they're nice and light for my hands... I just couldnt be happier with them!

And in the vein of Julie's cat posts, while trying to take photos of the knitting my lovely Vinnie attempted to usurp my attention by plonking himself dead centre on the knitting while I was fiddling with settings on the camera/phone. I got bitten for the trouble of removing him.

And as I sat at my computer this morning, I realised that I was sitting next to a spinning wheel, with a 1/3 full bobbin and a pile on unspun roving next to me. A little while later and I had this:
The focus is way off, but this is the closest to the true colour I could get. It's light fingering weight and is still planned for a(nother) shawl. I hadn't done any spinning for a couple of months, long enough that I'd forgotten how much I enjoy it. I'm also tempted to get out my spindle again, and remove the horrible coarse stuff that's currently on it and start using it again. I'd stopped using it after I experienced the speed of production a wheel offers.

I'm also rather happy with a discovery this morning. I'm a member of a number of yahoo groups, most having to do with spinning. This morning I found a group that was for fiber fanatics who had fibromyalgia and other problems, such as CFS, lupus and so on. So basically, a group of people who'll understand and offer advice for such thing as having trouble with knitting because you can't hold your hands steady enough to put the needle through the loops. The group can be found here for those of you who are interested.

Hopefully, more updates to come as I progress!