Buttontastic

There are two patterns that I would (and frequently do) recommend frequently to new knitters: Christine Vogel's Drop Stitch Scarf and Amy Duvendack's Big Button Hat.

I love being able to tell people that, so long as they can knit and wrap the wool around a needle, they can make the drop stitch scarf. No purls, no decreases, nothing complex. Considering how effective it is (especially in a variegated yarn) it's so easy for beginners to make something that looks fantastic and surprisingly impressive. It also teaches the most important lesson of all: the only hard part of knitting is the counting.

The genius of the Big Button Hat is, primarily, how quick it is to make. I can complete one in two hours but even a beginner can see results as soon as they start. I do tend to talk people through a flat version rather than working in the round but that's the other beauty of the pattern: it's worked in the same way as I teach knitting. Knit to start off with, then rows of stocking stitch as they learn purling and, finally, some basic decreasing. Hat!

In October, with our annual Christmas sale for WaterAid growing ever closer, I returned to the Big Button Hat with a vengeance. And buttons. Beautiful, beautiful buttons.

For the interested, the yarn is Wendy's Serenity chunky (lovely colours, amazingly soft and stunningly good value). But, I think you'll agree, the buttons are the real attraction of the hats.

Button

I am in love with this button. I think all hats shall have this button from now on.

This Big Button Hat is destined for the Wateraid sale at Christmas.

One Hundred and Thirteen Days

Although I love Christmas, I don't normally start planning and preparing for it quite this early on but, thanks to a major project in work, I'm already planning for December. So it only seems natural to start planning my knitting for December too.

Last year our work knitting group raised over £600 for Wateraid in our Christmas sale and the time has come to stop doing selfish knitting and to start on scarves, hats, gloves and tiny little stockings. Okay, so I actually started the stockings in February but that's beside the point.

I'm not the only one, we already have a dinosaur and several Christmas decorations in the Knitting Cupboard. I'm not sure I'll manage to contribute quite as much as last year but my bus knitting time is going to be turned over to the sale shortly.

So far I've only started one scarf, its another Loopy & Luscious because, I'm ashamed to say, the wool is fairly cheap. I don't begrudge donating my time and yarn to the sale but it's a lot easier to see the total as profit when things are sold for more than the cost of the wool alone.

The balls on the right will be hats, gloves and perhaps a Maluka, as they are very much the rage in knitting group right now.

Winterthorn

The hat has a name! Over Christmas I conducted exhaustive research into a good name for my pattern (I asked my family). Despite my sister's insistence on "Christmas Hat" or "Blue Christmas Hat" and my Dad's rather unhelpful "White Lightning" and slightly more helpful "White Thorn", I finally settled on Winterthorn. It seems to match the pattern and the colours.

I knitted three test panels in the end. The first was too small (3.25mm) and I didn't love the colours. The second was a better size but I hated the colours. The third was only a partial panel to get the lower border right. Plus I tried out a couple of options for rib. Unfortunately, by the time I got the the rib (and particularly the transition from rib to pattern) I was already rather tipsy on winter pimms so I think I missed some rather obvious stuff. Oh well.

The test knit is now well on its way, mostly because I have done pretty much nothing other than knitting and watching silly christmas family films for the past three days! I'm already at the decreasing and I have learned several things: my tension for continental purling sucks (the  test panel is waaay smaller than the real thing) and I need a LOT more practice at stranding.

I think that before I'm happy with this I'm probably going to have to make another, especially if I can find an interesting self-striping yarn with a nice slow colour change. If so, there will be one less repeat of the rib and that will probably be in 3.25mm.

The real doubt I'm having at the moment is the pattern itself. I was very wary of making it look too busy but now that it's almost done, I'm not sure there's enough detail on it. But I'm determined not to make my mind up until it's all finished. So tomorrow may include buying some 3.5mm DPNs as the circular is getting unwieldy.

Get dressed you merry gentlemen!

I love days when I have absolutely no plans so I've been very much looking forward to today. About the only thing I needed to achieve today was, ideally, making mince pies to distribute in place of Christmas cards. Well, I procrastinated for a while but eventually ended up listening to the Cabin Pressure Christmas special while making these:
 

Excessive pies mark the official start of Christmas



I heard the Christmas episode of Cabin Pressure last year. I remembered that it was funny but I'd forgotten just how funny. There are a lot of things I find amusing but Cabin Pressure makes me laugh out loud. Frequently and at significant volume.

I was particularly happy to hear at the end of the episode that they'll be broadcasting the first series from next week because I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't warm to it at first and I've only heard some of the more recent episodes. I don't really have any excuse except that I didn't give it the time it deserved at first because I thought that it might be too much situation and not enough comedy. Once again: idiot.

The Christmas special was the perfect example of properly funny jokes balanced by the interesting relationships between the characters. I think it's this that makes Cabin Pressure so great: the characters are more than just a method of getting jokes across, they feel like people you might very well know from your office. Or possibly eccentric members of your extended family. I was going to say "except maybe Arthur" but then I remembered a colleague, a nice girl but she had more in common with Arthur than any real person should.

Though I'm not really in a position to comment, today I was entirely empathising with Arthur and his overwhelming love of Christmas. As someone who has constructed decorations for her office out of garden canes, tacking thread and paper snowflakes made from old application forms, I think that an umbrella decorated with milk pots sounded pretty amazing.

Considering some of the more bleak Christmas radio (I'm looking at you, The Holly and the Ivy) it was fantastic to have something so decidedly pro-festive-spirit to listen to while making endless mince pies. Thank you John Finnemore, you genius, and thank you 4Extra for broadcasting it this week.


sucky stripes



Anyway, about the only other thing I've managed to achieve today is a test knit panel for my hat. Charting it actually proved to be easier than I thought but what's really giving me trouble now is colours. The default blue for 4ply is a boring powder blue and it's cramping my stripes. I suck at colour at the best of times and this is not the best of times. Plus the panel has turned out waaaay to small so I'll be knitting another, with bigger needles. And possibly more adventurous stripes now that I have caved in and bought another ball of wool. Unfortunately, it's a oddly bright turquoise that I'd never normally touch but I can't shake the idea that I can somehow make it work.

Also, I'm beginning to wonder if the calm, plant-y design in my head might not actually be a bit sinister and thorny now it's approaching reality.

I think I may like it better that way.



It was a week before Christmas and all through the house...

...there wasn't a sound except for occasional, irrational giggling.

As a certified Christmas nutcase the last two weeks of the year are, without a doubt, my favourite. I have too much childish joy for this season to concentrate it all into a single day. I finished work on Friday, which means that it is now officially Christmas as far as I'm concerned. That means an excess of eggnog lattes, snowflake earrings, mulled wine and Christmas radio.

But this year I feel like I must have got ahead of the season somehow. I know there are a large number of people that seem to take great pleasure in complaining about how early Christmas starts each year but surely they can't all have joined forces to delay it this year? Only in the last couple of days have I heard any adverts for Christmas radio and I've yet to catch a single festive drama. With only a week to go, surely that can't be right?

Fortunately I've a wealth of Christmas radio recorded from previous years so I have been wandering around in my own festive Radio 4 bubble, giggling wildly at old episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and Ladies of Letters.

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue has a special place in my heart at Christmas. I think I was probably about 14 when I began to realise that my crazy, childish love of Christmas was changing. I was growing up and, although all the incredibly specific, detailed traditions would remain (and still do), I didn't take the same joy in just opening presents and running round eating far too much chocolate. I had to find my own definition of what Christmas was going to mean as I got older.

At that point I'd long ago realised that Radio 1 wasn't technically compulsory for teenagers and I'd found my spiritual home in Radio 4. For all that I looked forward to Christmas day as a whole, one of the most exciting prospects was a special Christmas day episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. We had a fantastic morning, with the requisite presents and chocolate and wonderful fun with my family but my clearest memory is going back up to my room for a lovely chilled out half-hour while I listened to a crazy and impossibly festive half hour. I don't remember what I was given that year, except for the giggles.

I'm not saying that radio is the most important part of Christmas. That's my family and always will be. But Christmas radio still plays a really, really important part in my festive preparations. The cheesy, the silly and the emotive. They're all there for me while I'm on my own preparing for that one great day with my family. They all add up to that crazy mix of emotions that form Christmas. They're the reason I can carry my festive spirit all bright and shining through the next two weeks. They're the reason I have the most epicly decorated bank of desks in the office and they accompany me as I decorate my 3.5 Christmas trees and bake eight batches of mince pies.

But I now find myself in an almost unprecedented situation at this point in December: I've almost exhausted my supply from previous years already. I've even listened to The National Theatre of Brent's "The Greatest Story Ever Told", something I normally save for Christmas-Eve-Eve. I'm holding back on last year's Marley Was Dead but that's about all I've got in the bank for this week.

So this is a desperate plea to Radio 4 and 4 Extra: It's time to bring the Christmas radio, like a Dickensian white Christmas snowfall.