I Know That I've Said It Before...

I have of late become a very bad blogger. I keep looking at the blog and thinking that I really ought to write a post now and then but somehow something (usually knitting) always gets in the way.

Since I last wrote anything here I have spent all of my spare time designing shawls, scarves, hats and cowls, and then having designed them and created the patterns I have been knitting the various items. So far I have completed one hat, two scarves, one cowl, and one huge shawl. I also have two more shawls on needles being worked on morning, noon and night, a scarf that is half completed but needs a little bit of work done on its pattern before it can be completed, and a cowl which is being knitted by a friend. I also have ideas for a pair of mittens to match the hat, a large circular shawl which I have started to design and that I know how I want it to look but it is creating the pattern for it that is a bit more of a problem. I also have another shawl based on the four seasons that I have thought about but have yet to start on the design.

On top of this I am still teaching knitting and crochet classes and I'm due to teach some classes later in the year where the subject will be lace knitting. As this is a new set of classes for me I have yet to formulate what will be taught. One is for beginners to the art so that will require some careful thought and probably the preparation of a few slides to illustrate what we are doing. The second class is for more advanced knitters who already have some experience in lace knitting and will focus on creating a scarf or shawl to their own design so much of the three hour class will be spent actually creating a design and then test knitting it.

One of the shawls that I am actually working on at the moment has been on and off the needles four times over the last two days but I think that I have got it exactly how I want it now. This means that I can sit down to do a few more rows before going to bed and possibly getting to the stage where I am going to do something that I have never done before. I'm going to be adding beads to the shawl as part of the overall pattern. I know how to do it, I just haven't ever done it for real.

It's going to be a very busy month or so trying to get everything drafted, knitted, edited and then prepared for publication so that we can have the book ready for sale at the end of October. With that in mind I will try to sneak a few minutes every now and then and try to keep this blog updated. I might even try and sneak a few photographs of the various items into my posts so that you can see what I have been up to while I have been silent.

Working Hard And Making Mistakes

Last week I wrote a post saying that I was back and that I would start blogging again regularly. Nearly a week has gone by and I don't know where the days have gone. It seems that I am working harder now that I am unemployed (well, retired on medical grounds) than I was when I had a full-time job and was studying for a degree at the same time.

Perhaps it is the fact that what I am doing now does not come intuitively as things did during my working days. I found a job that I loved and that I was determined to do to the best of my ability. There were rewards along the way: promotion, opportunities to help develop better working practices, and a lot of travelling the world to see my counterparts in other organisations in Australia, Canada and the United States of America.

I have never seen myself as being creative in the artistic sense of the word. I can knit, I can crochet, I can do embroidery and dress making, but in each of these things I was always following someone else's pattern. Now that I am designing things for other people to knit I am having to be creative in a way that I have never been before. Trying to create original items, deciding which stitch patterns to put together and what the finished article should be are alien to me and therefore not very easy.

And yet, I am being able to create these designs. In a few week time I should have enough patterns for the book and all that will remain is the knitting of the samples that will be used to produce the photographs to illustrate each of these designs. As regular readers of this blog will know, I invariably have more than one project on the go at any given time. Things have not changed. At the moment I have two different scarves on the go at the moment and both of them require me to spend some time sorting out mistakes that I have made through not looking at the pattern properly. In one instance it was because I couldn't be bothered to print a copy of the chart that I have made a mistake which is going to involve me in unpicking approximately 10 rows. Fortunately the other mistake is only a row back and should be easy to correct if I can find a spare half hour this evening.

Much of today has been spent sat at the computer working on the chart for one of the larger items that I have designed. I still have a little work to do on it but I am hoping that I can get it finished this evening and updated on the computer ready for me to turn it into pdf format for my sample knitter. I also have to write the instructions about how the charts need to be laid out and what size needles it is to be knitted on. It is very fine yarn made of 70% baby alpaca, 20% silk and 10% cashmere (the alpaca and cashmere make it very soft when knitted and the silk gives it sheen and strength) and is a beautiful emerald green in colour. Choosing the needle size is important because I want use needles that are large enough to give the finished shawl plenty of drape, but not so large that it makes the finished knitting too floppy. I just might knit a few test swatches to see which needle size I like best.

Unfortunately, I am also having a bit of a battle with depression again as well as the arthritis in my hip. And to top it all off I have got a frozen shoulder again which is making it difficult to move my right arm without causing a great deal of pain and is even affecting me when I am knitting and I have never considered that to be a particularly strenuous occupation in the past. Perhaps my body is telling me that I am not getting any younger and that I have to accept that things aren't going to work so well as they did 20 or 30 years ago. The depression is making it difficult for me to always focus on the things that I need to do and is perhaps why I am making mistakes in my knitting. However, I am spotting the mistakes and I know how to rectify them so all is not lost and I am nowhere near as ill as I was this time last year.

Having written a quick update, I must go and get myself something to eat before settling down to work again. Who says that life gets easier when you are retired?

MSG Is Back!

Okay, so it's been a while since I wrote anything here. The weekly statistics were still being sent to my personal email address so I knew that there were still people looking at the blog, which I must admit I found somewhat amazing, and it was this that has caused me to reconsider whether to start writing it again.

One of the reasons that I stopped posting was because I thought it would be difficult for me to find things to write about now that my life has changed from what it was. I knew that it would be difficult to write about the daily goings on in the house and I wasn't sure that there was that much more going on in my life that I could write about and that anyone would want to read about. On reflection I have decided that there is probably enough going on that does not require me to break confidentiality and therefore I am going to try blogging again on a fairly regular basis.

So what has been going on in Madsadgirl's life over the last four months? Quite a lot really.

The crochet classes have continued throughout Spring and into the Summer. And I have also been teaching a knitting class each week. My own knitting has been suffering over the last month or so because I am busy designing items for a book. Yes, MSG is writing a knitting book, and not the one that she had in mind. The book is going to be about knitting lace and lace knitting.

Yes, I know that they may sound that they are the same thing but there is a very subtle difference. Lace knitting involves working the increases, decreases and yarnovers that create the pattern on right-side rows only and the wrong side rows being either knitted or purled with no patterning. Knitted lace involves working these pattern-forming stitches on both right and wrong side rows. Consequently knitted lace is far more complicated and you are likely to make more mistakes if you don't follow the pattern closely and those mistakes can be more difficult to pick up until you are several rows further through the pattern and can lead to a bit of silent swearing before sitting down to unpick the rows to get back to where the mistake is.

It is hoped that the patterns for the book and the samples for the photographs will be ready in September so that the book can be printed and released in time for the Christmas market. A few book signing opportunities have already been pencilled into the calendar so I have to keep my nose to the grindstone as far as designing is concerned. I already have one sample being knitted by a friend and I am busy working on two more. One pattern is waiting for the sample knitter to come back from a trip home to the US so that it can be worked on and a couple more have been written and are waiting for sample knitters to become available.

So, that is a brief update on what I have been doing and hopefully I can find things to write at least a couple of times a week so that the blog can become active again.

A Little Bit Of Blocking

I don't know what is wrong with me. I ought to be writing a post most days, there is certainly lots to write about, but I just don't seem to have the time. My excuse is going to be that I have been knitting like mad over the last few weeks in an effort to make all the things that I want to give as Christmas presents. I've even managed to find time to knit a few commissions, a hat and mittens for one of my knitting group friends who is too busy to knit herself because she has started to make beautiful knitting project bags and is inundated with orders, and a lace scarf for her daughter to give to her Mum (she couldn't knit herself because Mum would have seen it and know it was for her).

It is this scarf that caused me to dream up the title for this post. The blocking concerned is not writer's block, but the blocking that is required to get a piece of knitting to its proper size and shape. You should really block all knitting before you start joining seams and doing the finishing touches, but I have never done that, because I know that I knit to tension and I am sure that the various pieces of any garment that I make will fit together easily.

But when it comes to lace knitting then blocking is essential. This is generally because you knit lace on much larger needles than would be expected for the thickness of the yarn. The resultant knitting usually curls around itself and has no real shape whatsoever. In order to block something you have to first soak it for some time so that every fibre of the yarn gets wetted, then you drain the water out of the bowl and squeeze out the excess water from the item to be blocked, first by squeezing it with your hands making sure that it is a squeezing action and not a wringing one, and then wrapping it in an absorbent towel to get rid of as much water as possible.

The scarf that I had to block this morning was knitted in a lovely yarn made from kid mohair and silk. The yarn is a delight to knit with but as anyone who is familiar with mohair will know the yarn has lots of fibres protruding from the yarn; it's these that give mohair its tremendous warmth capability. I put the scarf into the bowl of tepid water and it just floated on the top of it. The water just wasn't getting into the fabric at all. It took a good five minutes of prodding and poking to make sure that every stitch of the scarf had absorbed the water. Half an hour later with the scarf damp and creased from the squeezing action it was time to get the blocking wires and pins out and lay the scarf out on a couple of towels, pull it to shape, then insert the wires and add a few pins to make sure that it was kept stretched to shape while it dried.

Eight hours later I took the pins and wires out and lifted the scarf from the towels. I held up a beautiful scarf with its lace pattern clearly visible and the points at each end of the scarf firmly shaped. It will be going to knitting group with me tomorrow so that I can hand it over to the person who commissioned me to make it.

I have another scarf on the floor now. This one is a far more elaborate lace design and is made from a yarn that is a mix of baby alpaca, cashmere and silk. This one absorbed the water far more readily but I was surprised to find that the water had changed colour when I came to drain it away. Then I remembered that the yarn is from a company that uses natural dyes and so a certain amount of colour should be expected to come out of the yarn when it is first wetted.

This scarf was a little easier to apply the wires to because of the eyelets that are a few stitches in from the edge on all four sides. I'm hoping that it will be dry in the morning and I can block another scarf before I head off for knitting group. I have five scarves and I shawl to block in total and the shawl will require me to move all the furniture around in my room so as to ensure that I have a large enough area on which to lay it out.

I think that in future I will block each item as soon as it is completed so as to not have this blocking frenzy that I am going to have to endure over the next week. But at least it is keeping me busy and I don't have time to think about how difficult the next few weeks are going to be for me.

Slight Improvement

Yes, there has been a slight improvement in my mood. Although I didn't get to sleep until gone 2am, once I was asleep I stayed that way and slept through most of this morning. That may seem like a waste of a good part of the day but when you have been surviving on a couple of hours sleep (or less) for a week, it is well worth losing those daylight hours.

Yesterday evening I managed quite a few rows on my latest lace shawl. It's a triangular shawl which starts with just 4 stitches and grows with an increasing number of stitches on alternate rows. It's not the most difficult pattern that I have ever knitted but it does require careful watching and I'm afraid that last night I was paying a little too much attention to Midsomer Murders and not enough to the pattern and I have made a mistake.

Making mistakes is an occupational hazard when knitting lace with its combination of knitting stitches together and yarn overs which create the lacy texture and the pattern in the lace. It looks as though I forgot to make a yarn over so I am a stitch short and the only way to correct it is to carefully unpick two rows stitch by stitch. If I was near the beginning of the shawl then this would not be too much of a problem but there are now just short of 200 stitches on the needles so unpicking those two rows is going to take quite a long time. I was going to do it last night so that I could pick up the knitting today and just move on, but I realised that it was probably a task for when I was a bit more awake so I put the knitting aside as a task for this afternoon or this evening.

I'm hoping that having managed to get some sleep last night the same will happen tonight. I hope that the vicious circle of not sleeping so I get depressed and because I am depressed I don't sleep has been broken. And I have something to look forward to tomorrow because I am meeting Lily for lunch and a chat. And I will be delivering Daisy Livingstone Fairy, too.

A Low Sunday

I can't say that I am feeling brilliant at the moment, in fact I am close to crying much of the time. But for some reason I have just picked up some knitting and I am seriously considering doing a row or two before I go to bed tonight. It will only be a row or two because it is one of my lace shawls that I have decided to have a go at. I haven't done anything to it since before I went into hospital so it is going to seem strange working on it again.

I eventually got to sleep at about 3 o'clock this morning and woke at about 8.30. It wasn't long before I was asleep again and remained so until 1.30pm. This means that I am not feeling tired at the moment and because I have to get up early tomorrow I don't want to rely on tablets for sleep tonight in case I oversleep in the morning.

Tomorrow morning sees me going to see the HTT so that I can report on how I have managed over the Christmas and New Year period. I don't think that I can say any more than that I survived. I ate every day, but spent many days wishing that my life was over. This is not a good state of mind to be in and I have to hope that it will pass.

Intricate Fair Isle For Cheats

Over the years I have had a go at most styles of knitting. There's the traditional plain and purl alternate rows, Aran with its complex cables and and plaits, lace knitting with its lightness and fragility achieved by the judicious insertion of eyelets throughout the work, and Fair Isle where a pattern is achieved by using wools of various colours all in the same row.

Earlier this year I knitted myself a jumper that had the appearance of being a Fair Isle pattern but wasn't; the effect was achieved by clever dying of the wool.It's quite clever but it's not really the real thing. Of course, the benefit is that there is no need to weave the various colours along the back of the knitting so that they are ready for use when stitches of that colour are to be knitted in the pattern. Fair Isle patterns are usually quite complicated and can use five or more different colours to achieve the effect; this means that they are also slow to knit and prone to mistakes which can be difficult to spot when you make them and glaringly obvious if left uncorrected.

I have some more wool like that which I have used for the scarf and mittens that I wrote about here. It's in different shades, and rather than have lots of hats, scarves and mittens that were all the same design, although different in colour, I decided to have a go at a different pattern for the next set of winter accessories that I was to knit.

After several false starts, I have managed to progressed my hat to the stage that the pattern is starting to show rather well. The difficulty is ensuring that the run of colours in the two balls of wool that you use (so it is a bit like traditional Fair Isle knitting) are sufficiently different so that the pattern is not lost through the colours being too similar in hue.
Here is one of the balls that I am using at the moment. The colour is called Autumn Rainbow and it is a mixture of greens, browns and reds; real autumn colours. Because the lengths of each colour in any given ball of wool are different, you can find yourself knitting with two balls of wool but all the stitches appear to be the same colour because of the way the subtle changes in each ball occur. This was what caused me to have to repeatedly unpick what I had done and start again, but I seem to be have got it right this time and my hat is progressing nicely.
Yes, it can be called Fair Isle because it uses more than one ball of wool in each row, but the pattern looks more complex than it actually is because of the clever colour changing in the balls of wool themselves. I'm almost up to the point where I start to decrease to form the crown of the hat, but having measured it I realised that I probably needed to knit another inch to make sure that the hat would be of sufficient length to ensure that it covered my ears, after all I don't want cold ears in winter.

I was working my way through the rows and knew that about four more would get me to the point where I could actually start to decrease when a chance glance at the knitting showed that I had made a mistake. Not one stitch in the wrong colour; that would be easy to correct. I had inadvertently knitted rows 4 and 5 of the six-row pattern twice so I have to unpick two rows. I have unpicked the first one and I'm halfway through the second one, and then I shall get the pattern back on track before I pack it up for the night.

After the hat, it will be mittens to match (I have a free pattern from the yarn's creators that has them both on it) and I have enough wool to make a scarf so I shall create that myself as a simple tube with the pattern on it and then sew up or crochet together the openings at either end to finish it off. It should look rather attractive when the set is completed.

Something Lacy

After finishing the socks I was going to knit another pair (I have yarn for at least 5 more pairs in my stash), this time using a different pattern, but I decided that I needed to get to work on some of the Christmas presents that I am making for my 'other family' in Canada. I have decided that the ladies might each like a hand-knitted lace scarf and as these take a bit longer than a pair of socks to knit I knew that I ought to get started. I have yarn for four scarves already put by so all I needed to do was find some patterns. I had a number of patterns in mind but it was very difficult to choose which one to make; however the decision was made and I started knitting but, as is always the way when I am using very fine yarn, each time I got started I ended up dropping stitches and because the scarf was only a few rows in length, the stitch would drop all the way down and I would have to unpick the work and start again. I began to think that this was going to be as difficult as the Shetland lace shawl that I made at the beginning of the year, but I decided to try a different pattern and this time I had a little more success.

I have two hanks of each of the two colourways in the above photograph, which will be enough for four nice long lacy scarves. The yarn is a very fine and soft alpaca so I have had to stop wearing dark coloured tops while I am knitting with it because it looks as though I have been sitting with a cat on my chest after an evening's work. But having found a suitable pattern, the first scarf is growing quite nicely now and measures approximately 10 inches at the moment and at a guess the finished scarf will be something over 60 inches in length.It is very difficult to determine the lace pattern at the moment because the knitting is so springy, but once the scarf is finished and has been blocked (this means soaking it in cool water so that all the fibres are wet and then squeezing out as much water as possible before stretching the scarf to its finished dimensions and then leaving it to dry) the pattern should be somewhat clearer. It is supposed to look like a series of tumbling leaves and hopefully blocking the scarf will make the pattern show up, but even if it isn't as clear as it might be in a slightly thicker laceweight yarn, it will be very warm and soft around the neck. Something that will be nice to have for the cold Canadian winters.

A Quick Update On The Knitting (And Crochet)

I have been crocheting another scarf like the one that I showed you all the other day. This time the wool comprises a real rainbow of colours rather than just being the blue/green/purple combination of the previous example. The photograph below shows it in its early stages and it is now almost complete, but I needed a change from crocheting which can be a bit hard on my wrist, so it has been put away for a few days and I am back to knitting.
I have written before about how I like to have several projects on the go at the same time so that I don't get bored with what I am working on. Last week I bought a book entitled Victorian Lace Today, which includes a number of patterns from Victorian times which have been updated or comprise elements from several different pattern designers from those times. The scarf below is being knitted using a pattern from 1847 and it is progressing slowly but steadily as I try to complete one complete of the pattern each day, although I have to admit that I haven't done any of it for a couple of days because I have been working on something else.
I have been taking a break from the scarf to work on the shawl shown below. Instead of using very fine laceweight wool, this shawl is a little more substantial and is made using some sock yarn that I bought for another project, but once I started knitting it I didn't like the finished article so I unpicked it and the wool was available for something else. That something else has turned out to be a half-hexagon shawl which is progressing well. I have finished the first two pattern charts and I am now on the second repeat (of five) of the third pattern chart for this shawl. While the top of the shawl is quite substantial having very little in the way of lace patterning in it (this should mean that it will sit on the shoulders well and be warmer than something that is completely lacy), the second and third pattern charts are much more lacy in appearance and as the size of needle used increases as the shawl progresses the lower parts will be more flowing. With 45 more rows to be knitted and then a complex cast off which involves the use of a crochet hook as well as the knitting needle, the shawl won't be finished tomorrow but the weekend should see its completion.
I am then going to start knitting some socks, something that I haven't done for a number of years, but there are so many lovely sock yarns available these days and an incredible number of sock patterns, I am rather looking forward to working on them in the coming weeks. All I have to do now is make sure that I have the needles in the sizes that I require and then I can start to use some of my stash of sock wool that has been building up over the last few weeks. One thing is for certain, I am going to have nice warm feet this winter.

A Bad Day With The Knitting

It's been another hot day and I am flagging in the heat. They say it's going to be hotter tomorrow and I know that if I am going to venture out it will have to be early in the morning because I am finding it difficult to deal with outside temperatures after about 10.30 in the morning.

The net result of this is that I have been spending a lot of time indoors knitting and watching DVDs. I would love to say that the knitting was going well, but after a period of rapid progress on the shawl that I am knitting things have slowed down dramatically over the last couple of days. I keep making mistakes and not spotting them until I have done several more rows. This means that I have to unpick the knitting stitch by stitch and this is a soul destroying task when you have to do it more than once. I am on my second major unpicking stint at the moment and after working at it for about an hour this afternoon, I put my knitting down and I have not touched it since.

I will probably return to it tomorrow, but I know that I am going to have to take a bit more care when I start the row in which I keep making the errors. This will mean sitting in a silent room, no television, DVD, radio or CD to distract me, and knit each stitch after carefully referencing the chart. I know that I can get it right in the end.

Sometimes I ask myself why I chose to knit such complicated lace patterns, but I suppose that it is because I have always faced up to a challenge and knitting is after all just two types of stitches; it's just what you do with them that makes something fancy rather than plain.

And knitting is one of the life-saving things in my life. I would be totally lost without it.

Another Hot Day

It's nearly 10.30am on this Monday morning and it is already too hot to do any more work in the garden. I've managed to finish the job that I was working on, but there is still more work to do and the rain on Saturday night coupled with the hot weather means that the grass is growing at an alarming rate. I guess it will be out with the lawn mower early tomorrow morning.

Moving back indoors to get away from the heat of the sun means that I will probably have time for more knitting today than I would normally have. I'm still being very naughty and not finishing the summer tops that I have been working on. Instead I have been concentrating on the shawl that I started last week.

There are eight charts that make up the pattern and I have just finished the fourth one. I now have something like 560 stitches on the needle and each row is taking longer to knit as the number of stitches increases. There are still 82 rows of the main shawl to be knitted which means that there are still another 328 stitches to be added to it. By the time that I reach that stage each row will become quite slow going.

I still have not decided what sort of edging that I am going to use on it. I think that I will wait until I have actually finished the main pattern so that I can work out the best way to finish it off. I'm thinking of making it quite a deep edging as it seem that I will have a fair amount of wool left for the finishing off, but it will require some careful calculations for me to determine how many 'points' the edging should have on each side and on each of the corners so that it gives a pretty edging that will ripple a little. The problem with this is that maths is not one of my strong points. I have number dyslexia and find it very difficult to work these sorts of problems out so there will probably be a lot of numbers being written out on paper and drawings of how things break down before I reach a successful conclusion.

This will be the first time that I have designed anything like this. While I have adapted patterns a little in the past, I have never created something like this from scratch. However if the it turns out successfully, I intend to try to design a lace shawl from scratch and if it works out well I may see about getting it published. Lace knitting is increasing in popularity again and with so many beautiful yarns available to do such work, there seems no end to what can be achieved.