Unplanned Scenic Diversion

Okay, so I got a bit lost while walking in the peak district. But at least I had plenty of time to think while I tried to find my way back to the path. It turns out that navigating by a stream is only a good plan provided that there aren't four streams.

I took some yarn on holiday in the hopes of working out a couple of patterns that have been in my head for a while. It all seemed a bit boring though and, on my walk, something else started growing in my mind. There's an interesting border in one of my stitch books. It's a cable with an in-built fringe that has caught my eye a few times though I've never quite had a use for it.

I'm not sure whether it was the lovely, expansive surroundings or the chilly evenings in my tent with no big, drapey wrap for my shoulders but by the end of the holiday I knew what I wanted to make. It would be a crescent-ish shaped wrap/scarf, worked side-to-side with the fringe on the lower border. I deliberated a bit on what would go into the centre but I was fairly certain it would be something very open and not too same-y.

When I came home I started on a few prototypes. I began with my Chiminea lace and played around trying to get something a little more elongated that would flow better over the whole length of the scarf.

The colours are extreme, I know, but these are just prototypes. The large rectangular block shows the progression from the Chiminea pattern (just visible at the lower end) through some messy attempts at cable, through something that's a little promising, into a pattern that I'm actually happy with.

Then I had to work out how the increasing would work, that's up in the top right. This isn't the first attempt, it got ripped back three times before I was happy.

In the bottom left you'll see two versions of the braid/fringe, the left-most one is by the book but the one on the right is a lot stronger. The fringe is made by dropping stitches and cutting the loops but the by-the-book version is far too loose and I wouldn't trust it to hold together for long. The second version has a twisted stitch between the fringe and the pattern which really locks in the fringe.

The yellow triangle was an attempt to bring it all together but the cable is too narrow and the shape is all wrong.

The blue triangle that's still on the needles is attempt six (at least!) and is the product of a long team meeting. I  tried a lot of ways to start things off but I'm really happy with the final result. Happy enough that I've now cast on draft one of the real thing.

There was one section that I couldn't face prototyping: how to get from the end of the blue triangle to the start of the blue.... trapezium? So instead I just went for it. And that seemed like a good plan until I got to row 55 last night and realised that I'd gone very wrong and had forgotten two stitches entirely from my pattern. That'll teach me to be patient with my prototypes.

The Chrysalids

Well, this is  my one-hundredth post. No one is more surprised than me, I didn't imagine that I'd manage to keep this up past four or five. No comments about how photos of yarn or random things don't count.

Anyway. A few months ago we were discussing books in work. I'm pretty devoted to my books. I'm far too over-protective about the condition of the covers, I don't lend them to anyone and the idea that I might get rid of a book once I'd read it is utterly unthinkable. The person I was talking to is the complete opposite and the argument he put forward was: "You only read 1000 books in your life time, why would you go back to the same book twice?"

At the time, I couldn't clearly frame my reasons for reading some books over and over. It's easy enough to try to make an analogy like, "You watch films more than once" or "You go back to the places that you enjoy more than once". But it's more than that. Reading is an experience that depends as much upon the reader as the book. I return to books because, although they may be the same, I'm not.

I don't return to every book but there are three or four that I go back to every few years and one of these is The Chrysalids, a novel by John Wyndham that was dramatised on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago (sorry, it's already fallen off iplayer). It's the story of a young man with telepathic-like powers in a world that fears and punishes any difference from the norm.

I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I first read it but I was probably around eleven. It wasn't the first book for adults that I'd read but it was the first time that I read a book and realised that, while I enjoyed it, I was only seeing one facet of the story. To an eleven year old girl, it's an adventure story about a boy with special powers who works with his friends to escape the dangers of their village. But every time I've re-read the book, I've found something more in it. As a teenager it was a story about not fitting in. As an adult it's a story about the terrible things that people can do when they believe that they're right.

There was an adaptation of the Chrysalids in 1981, broadcast in the last year on 4 Extra but it felt like a dramatisation of my eleven-year-old understanding of the book. The recent two-hour version captured the atmosphere of fear, paranoia and secrecy that I came to recognise in the book as I grew older.

With a core set of characters that are children growing to young adults, it'd be easy to concentrate on these aspects but the play focused on the implications of their 'deviations' and the tyranny of the society that feared them. Obviously there's a lot of detail that is missing from any adaptation but it didn't feel missing. Despite knowing every inch of the plot I still thoroughly enjoyed the play.

Representing their thought-shapes into words over the radio is bound to be a bit of a simplification but it was well handled. Just confusing and noisy enough to remind us that it's not exactly words but clear enough to be clearly understood. The overall effect was to draw you into their world and drive home the uniquely close relationships between main characters as they shared their thoughts and feelings. Something that definitely passed me by when I first discovered the boo

I'd recommend listening to The Chrsysalids if it's broadcast again. And if not then I'd recommend the book, regardless of your age. It's a story that will grow with you.

Rewarding Rewards

I've written a few times about my growing kickstarter addiction and I know I mentioned that I was supporting Sara of Smudge Yarn's project to fund the development of her Irish yarn business. For my reward I chose unspun fibres, the colour blend is Illuminate (inspired by colours in illuminated manuscripts) and I chose to have it blended with metallic fibres. It arrived in the post shortly before I went on holiday and I couldn't have been more delighted.

I don't know what I imagined illuminated manuscript colours might be but, as soon as I saw the blend, I understood completely. The mix is fantastic and the fabulous coppery fibres perfectly highlight the other colours. I don't think I've ever been so excited to start spinning something and I even managed to start before I went on holiday.

I tend to spin quite finely. My spinning teacher described me as one of nature's laceweight spinners but even my best attempts ave been fairly inconsistent up until now. But something about this blend suited me perfectly. I mean, absolutely perfectly. I think I only broke my thread three times during the whole lot, which is utterly unprecedented. There are a few burrs (texture!) but, for the most part, the yarn is smooth, consistent and exactly what I was aiming for.

Most of my spinning has been Navajo plied but, because I was hoping for the maximum length from this, I decided to just go for two ply. The result is somewhere between laceweight and 4ply weight but I'm hoping it should still be suitable for the project I had in mind. Unfortunately, the 270 metres on this skein probably isn't enough so I'm hoping that I might be able to buy another 100g of the same blend.

I'm not sure what I'm looking forward to more: knitting this skein or hopefully spinning another!

Repeat

Quite a few years ago, when I was just getting back into knitting, I found some very discounted rowan yarn on sale. It was lovely, soft, spongey and asymmetrically plied with a single metallic thread. It was probably the first yarn I bought that was in any way out of the ordinary. Of course I had no idea what to do with it, but when has that ever stopped any knitter?

I bought four balls of purple and a ball each of blue, grey and dusky pink. Then, with the exception of a moderately wearable hat, the balls lurked under my bed for years.

Four years ago my sister was pregnant and, as it got colder her bump got bigger. So I dug out the wool and I knitted her a large but fairly shapeless and uninspired bump-wrap. The best part were the large and sparkly buttons I found to co-ordinate with the purple wool.

Now my niece is three and a half and my sister decided to clear out her maternity clothes. She let me have the bump-wrap back so I could salvage the buttons but I managed to recover more than that. I unravelled the yarn, wrapped it onto my niddy-noddy and the skein took its place in my own personal yarn shop.

There it remained until I came to pack up for my holiday last week. I knew I had to pack projects that I'd really feel like knitting in my tent in the evenings. They had to be projects for which I had the pattern printed or something I could read from my phone. And they had to be interesting.

There's something fascinating about the idea of knitting a lacey pattern in aran/worsted weight yarn so once I'd decided to do something with my purple Rowan, I knew it had to be a scarf. I procrastinated from my packing by scouring Ravelry until I came across Arroyo. Worsted, interesting, long, a little unconventional but straight-forward enough to read from my phone. In short, everything I was looking for! And, once that was decided, I knew that I'd be making it for my sister.

At times the rows were frustratingly long. I added a few more horizontal repeats because I knew I'd have yarn to spare. As the evenings drew in and the tent got a little chilly, 271 stitches felt like 250 too many but I'm so pleased with the results.

I'll admit that I had my doubts about the large area of garter stitch and but it came out fantastically springy, I just wanted to dig my fingers into it the whole time. In fact, the hardest part turned out to be blocking the points out without stretching out the garter stitch at all. I blocked the points out more than the pattern called for because the pattern's just too beautiful to not show off to its full.

I'd highly recommend this pattern. I've been frustrated recently because I've knitted several scarf/shawl/wraps that aren't quite long enough. This is quite the opposite, it's not only lovely but it's practical. I'm really hoping that my sister will get a lot of use out of it, either as a wintery scarf or as something to put round her shoulders on chilly evenings. Tent optional.

Rewind

I'm not much of one for ripping back my knitting. When I make mistakes I generally catch them in time to correct or disguise them and, if not, then I can usually live with it. I find it distressing when I see some of the almost-complete projects that some of my friends have ripped back. So it was pretty much unprecedented when I ripped back a section this large:

Recently I've been working on a new bus project, a South Sea Treasures shawl. It wasn't a bus project to start with, there were far too many stiches and the pattern was far too fiddly, not to mention the frustratingly slow process of threading the far-too-small-holed beads. But by the time I reached the main section it was perfect for the bus and it lived in my handbag for several weeks.

The pattern is Russian with an English translation. There are three charts knitted in sequence followed by short rows to form a crescent. It was only by about half-way through the third chart that I really grasped what was going on in the symbols. I don't know if it's just a different convention of charting in Russian but I couldn't make my knitting look like other peoples' photos.

The symbol key shows dots for knit and dashes for purls but, from what I can gather, these are actually dots for stocking stitch and dashes for garter stitches. But this isn't what caused me to rip back dozens of rows, I can live with a little muddling between stocking stitch and garter stitch.

The main cause of my confusion was the third chart:

Someone else had suggested that there might be an error in the central stitch as it would need a decrease to maintain the stitch count. But the more fundamental problem I found was that the second chart is worked across 12 stitches and the third is worked across 14 stitches.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the mangled, crazy results of trying to align a 12 stitch and 14 stitch pattern but it was not pretty. The only reason I kept going with it for so long (to row 57) was that I couldn't work out how I would fix it if I *did* rip it back. But somewhere around row 57 I was struck by a revelation and realised that it wasn't row 30 that was misleading but rows 26 to 29.

This is what I think the chart should look like (count-wise, I make no comment on the actual stitch symbols):

It seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, I know. The chart starts off with 12 stitches then the increases in row 30 bring it up to 14 for the rest of the chart. There definitely isn't a decrease in row 30, that just makes the problem worse and leads to large swathes of ripping back. As I mentioned above, I think that rows 26 to 29 are actually all knit, then for rows 30 to 35 are alternating knit/purl to form stocking stitch.

On the whole, I'd recommend the pattern but look carefully at the charts and some of the photos on Ravelry before you start. I'm quite certaun now that the charted stocking stitch/garter stitch sections are effectively reversed throughout.

I completed the shawl with about two inches of yarn to go (from one beautiful, soft, luxurious skein of Manos lace). If - or maybe when - I make this again, I'll probably skip at least one repeat in the middle section of chart three and add a few horizontal repeats to make it a bit longer because, although it does go round my shoulders, I'm not too sure how I'll wear it.