A Byatt for EYF

In the build up to The Edinburgh Yarn Festival, one of my favourite designers, Karie Westermann, released a new shawl pattern, Byatt. I used to be a shawl knitter, back when things like not having to match gauge or select a similar yarn and it not really mattering how big or small the finished item came out were my primary considerations in deciding what to knit. But a few years ago I decided that I really want to be a garment knitter, socks and sweaters, with a selection of head- and hand-coverings to get me through the winter. But as my Twitter timeline filled with people's (judiciously retweeted) plans to make and wear Byatts to EYF, my No More Shawls resolve melted and, I reasoned, I had appropriate wool (two skeins or Ripples Crafts 100% BFL superwash in a natural cream and teal blue) -already wound into cakes. Kismet!

I cast-on in plenty of time and worked away on the garter stitch section and had just reached the two colour stripy section when I looked in my project and realized...I was almost out of my main colour! It hadn't been a mistake when I listed them as 50g balls, they really were half the length I needed! I searched Helen's site for the same colours on the same base to no avail, and settled on a skein of blue with a hint of teal and a complimentary silver, hoping I could switch to a similar colour-way on the stripes without having a jarring change and having to start over.

Readers, I had to start over. The blue did have hints of teal but nothing like the colour I'd started with. That's the bad new; the good news is that the new shade was a million billion times better (and it's not like I disliked the teal, I'd bought it after all) than the first one. The blue and silver took my Byatt from a project I'd planned to knit, wear to EYF, and give away if I found it didn't suit (after all, I have a cupboard full of shawls I never wear) to something I reach for every day. 

I spent every waking moment, the week before EYF knitting. I ran out of my main colour, the blue, with exactly one row left to knit so I skipped it and started on the other side with the silver. I finished the picot bind-off (is there anything worse when you're down to the wire?) with just enough time to soak and block it Thursday night before our Friday morning train to Edinburgh. I didn't find a shawl pin I liked at EYF, so I ordered one from Nicholas And Felic off etsy.

I could not be happier with my Byatt. My ravelry queue may have suddenly acquired a bunch of two-colour shawls.

A lot to catch up on

Since my last post in which we learned I was going to have a miscarriage we've, in no particular order, had a miscarriage, Little Djinn turned two, Chris had shingles, Little Djinn had chicken pox, a pipe burst at the new house, we actually started construction at the new house, and we went to the Edinburgh yarn festival. Almost all of these deserve a post of their own, but let's see what we can knock out:

Having a miscarriage sucked salty donkey balls. I'm just talking physically here, people, emotionally it's been a constant layer of low-level sad with occasional spikes of high-level sad. Sad, not soul-destroying or shattering or some of the other valid emotional responses people have to losing a pregnancy. My emotions tend to run quieter than that. But physically, it was excruciating. It was al,out two full weeks of waiting for something to happen and then a couple hours of, frankly, labour with nothing to show for it. Highlights include having been at work when it started and getting to take a taxi home while absolutely hemp raging blood (Dear sir, thank you, I'm sorry.), feeling like a lava lamp in reverse (I'll not explain, for the sake of the squeamish), not being able to leave the toilet for several hours while at the same time being so light headed that sitting up for more than two minutes made me black out. It was...certainly not something I'd do a third time. Then I had the heaviest, crampiest, menstrual cycle of my life and it lasted a full two weeks and another week after that to stop having lightheaded spells. 

Meanwhile, K turned two three days after my scan. I'd not managed to plan anything more involved than asking two of her friends to meet us at the soft play. I didn't say anything about it being her birthday but they each brought a present and each got a goodie bag in return. One gift was a playdoh kitchen thing and K went wild for it. We gave her a little play kitchen, grandma got her a little helper stool for the kitchen, and she got some farm themed toys. She's been doing really well at eating "real" food, suddenly has All the Words, and regressed slightly on sleeping when I had the miscarriage, which we figure was stress about Mama and Daddy both being poorly.

A few weeks after Chris' shingles finally cleared up, I noticed Little Djinn had a pimple on her temple and we went out to play with some friends. That night she had more pimples and I thought it was a reaction to the new cream the doctor gave her for her eczema. The next morning the first pimple was definitely a pox and looking back over our week the symptoms all fit. We spent a little over a week staying home (except going to see E, her family having had it already) and at this point even the scabs have fallen off. She never particularly noticed that she had chicken pox until the scabs formed and those itched, and it's been about 21 days and none of her friends have reported symptoms so it looks like that's done and dusted. Yay for having a toddler with zero interest in touching or being touched by other children?

Meanwhile, at the new house, the boiler had a slow leak. Aged Parent had called out people to look for it, we'd called out people to look for it, nothing was found or fixed, and we just had to keep an eye on the water level. Then there was a cold snap and the radiator in the conservatory popped a cap, the boiler bleed dry, a pipe froze and the two front rooms, the ones we weren't fixing up, got flooded. Did I mention our insurance only covered the first six months for unoccupied water damage? Bugger. That was also the day the building warrant finally came through so the rooms are fixed and the extension and office are being built.

And that's how much time Little Djinn is willing to give me. 

Not the update I'd planned

One of the reasons I haven't done an end-of-the year round up is that my what-to-knit for the New Year was heavily influenced by the exciting but not ready to be public news that we were expecting our second child, a little Sylph. My head was full of baby blankets and shawl front cardigans, not something one can discuss without tipping one's hand.

I was 12 weeks on Sunday, just out of the "danger zone" of early miscarriages and finally starting to feel better except for coming down with an absolutely horrendous head cold the same day. Being pregnant means a weakened immune system and not being able to take any drugs so bad colds are that much worse. And today, finally, my dating scan, the ultrasound where they revise your Estimated Due Date by the size of the fetus. Children are strongly discouraged from attending so C stayed with Little Djinn and I set off alone, pockets carefully loaded with money for pictures of the scan (exact change only, please).

There is no fetus. I have what is called an anembryonic pregnancy - conception happened, cells started dividing, hormones went crazy, but the cells that were supposed to become the baby...well, they didn't. For now we're waiting to see if my body will spontaneously abort or I can get surgical or medical "treatment". The word abortion was never, ever uttered.

Goodbye Sylph. I know you never actually existed but we were really happy when we thought you did.

23 Months and a New Year

Happy 2015! Things continue to go well for us, but we can't wait for all of Little Djinn's classes and playgroups to start up again. The ones at the local theatre ended in early November so they could use the rooms for rehearsals and storage for the Christmas Panto* so we've been missing her favourite Wednesday class. It starts up again in a fortnight and hopefully it will be a similar mix of mellow kids. Swim lessons and soft play at the leisure centre (gym) have been on a fortnight hiatus for the school holidays; they resume next week and we have two sessions left. I want to enrol Little Djinn in the 2-3 yo swim lessons but she doesn't turn two until the Sunday after classes start so I'm not allowed. She's blowing bubbles, jumping off the wall, and putting her whole face under water to pick the ring up from the bottom of the pool and the other babies...aren't. Her friend, C, turns two this week so they'll be moving up without us.

Little Djinn isn't making huge progress on feeding herself. She eats pretty well if you give her something to do and spoon it in for her, but she's not interested in feeding herself unless it's cereal. If we leave out bowls of snack foods she'll graze through the day, but not "enough". The first half of December she ate really well, asking for food (which we had to feed her) and then she grew again and had pretty much zero interest in eating for a week and her ribs were standing out again. Getting her to feed herself is definitely a goal for the early part of 2015. I suspect we're going to have to go cold turkey on her food pouches and let her get hungry enough to feed herself but she's so slender, she can't really afford the week or more of not eating. And yes, I honestly think, based on past behaviour, that it'll take weeks of not eating for her to decide to do it for herself.

She's starting to pick up words, though most of them are missing key letters. She has a lot of "b" words like Blue, Ball, Bowl, and (light)Bulb but not the L's. She can stay Story, Star, and Stool but not that first S. She says "please" (sometimes, mostly she signs it) and up, on and off which she uses for conceptually different things like lights, wearing clothing, and stacking blocks. She gets new words weekly if not daily but you largely have to work it out from context.

Little Djinn loved Christmas. Christmas Trees are her new favourite thing and she always wanted to poke at the baubles, the lights, and the stars. We put ours up pretty early for her, a potted tree we'd bought last year and put on the table so she couldn't pull it over, and it dominated the room. Every morning she'd ask Daddy to turn the lights on first thing, then when I came down I'd turn on the snowflake fairy/Christmas lights in the windows. We had a fill-your-own advent calender which I filled with the conveniently sized 24 mini-bar Green & Blacks tasting box. Each day I'd break the little bar in thirds and LD would hand the first piece to Daddy, take one for herself, and feed me the last piece. Except for the day, about halfway through, when she ate the first piece, then, having been chided, spit it out and offered it to him. Cheers for that. We also had an Eric Carle pop-up advent with ornaments and presents to decorate a tree which she liked but sat on fairly early. I mentioned to my mother that I want to get an ornament tree advent calender like we had growing up and she offered us the one she made, but then later she said that she wants it for the Christmas Open House in her neighbourhood next year so I'll look into getting our own.

We took Little Djinn to see the mall Santa twice but, while she liked the trees in the grotto and the animatronic mice, she wasn't interested in going anywhere near Santa. Oh well, maybe next year. We let her open presents as they arrived so as not to overwhelm her, but I think present opening could have ended after stockings and she would have still thought herself the luckiest little toddler in the whole world. She's hardly let go of the two little matchbox cars she got. My most notable gifts were a tea-of-the-month subscription from the cats and an auto-brewing teapot from Little Djinn (C must have seen me blanche slightly at that one as he hastened to let me know it was a deal-of-the-day and we did not pay full retail for it). It's shiny. I'm going to be ruined for the average cuppa. C got a pie maker (like a waffle maker but for individual pies) and cookbook, and a weather tracking kit which we'll put up at the new house. The kitties got a larger litter box (Oliver is a heffalump) and mat, and a bunch of catnip mice. Little Djinn keeps playing with the latter.

We had to take down the tree on NYD. It wasn't happy inside and was in serious danger of losing all its needles. Little Djinn screamed a bit when she realized what I was doing, and was sad this morning when it was still gone, but she's largely okay with it. I showed her where the tree is outside so we can check up on it from time to time.

In non-Christmas news, her favourite things are playdough and youtube videos. She's actually learning things from her videos even though studies say kids don't, she's much stronger on her colours and shapes and that's largely the videos. This was all well and good until her first gen fruit tablet (the one I replaced with a second gen mini because it was no longer supported, I couldn't get new apps, and the old ones kept crashing) finally died so now we're having to time share mine. We're going to get her a replacement android tablet with a less than stellar battery life (we used to leave her tablet only partially charged so she'd have a built-in time limit).

In older news, we once more hosted a successful international Thanksgiving. From California we had B and K (he was in country for a conference and she was doing a semester abroad in Cardiff). A came up from London, and our down-the-road neighbours T and Miss A came around. Little Djinn was delighted to have everyone except T, with whom she didn't want to share her toys. At one point she took her tricycle away from him so I pointed him to the push-pram and she scooted over and started pushing it while riding her tricycle. It turns out he really wanted her toy police car which was perfect because she didn't care if he played with that. Clearly we need to work on sharing on the home turf.

*Pantomime, a slapstick musical comedy, usually based on fairy tales or the like. Huge Christmas entertainment over here, usually aimed at families but there are "adult" ones as well.

The World's Slowest Knitter

The esteemed Yarn Harlot recently asked Twitter how long it takes (the rest of us) to knit a pair of socks. This is a woman who is known to be a very fast knitter and can knit a pair of socks in a day which is, um, yeah. BLD (Before Little Djinn) I could knit a pair of socks in two or three weeks which means if I knit nothing but socks I could have, say, 14 pairs a year. That's not a lot of socks. ALD (After Little Djinn), well, my mother bought me a skein of Opal 6-ply (sportweight) sock yarn and Hiya Hiya needles for my birthday when I was in California in June. I started them on the 16th and finished them last weekend. This was not exclusive knitting, but they were my handbag project, the one that went with me to knit night ever week, the ones I worked on when I finished a ball of yarn for my red cardigan and didn't want to wind another ball just yet, or when Little Djinn and I were playing at the Floral Hall and I would knit as I trailed after her. They weren't exclusive but I did work on them a lot. And 6-ply yarn is thicker so it knits up quicker than the usual 4-ply sock yarn. I am the world's slowest knitter.

I am not a process knitter. I mean, I knit because I enjoy the process of knitting, but I'm not knitting for the sake of knitting, I'm knitting because I want to make things. I want to have a stable of toys for Little Djinn, a closet full of hats and scarves/cowls and gloves/mitts/mittens. I want all three of us to have a closet full of sweaters for any mood and weather. I want to wear hand knit socks every day and twice on Tuesday, and slippers for around the house. Heck, when I have knit all the things I may turn my hand to charity knitting (the kind where you make actual things for actual people, not "raise awareness" on behalf of global corporations), and things for the house like blankets, cushions, and bathmats. Heck, when I knit all the things I'll even have time for sewing because I wouldn't be thinking "if I take an afternoon to sew that toybox together I'll never finish my knitting!"

I'm already dedicating as many hours a day as I can to knitting so clearly I need to knit faster. Any way you hold your yarn and needles and get stitches is the correct way to do it, but clearly some ways are more efficient than others and my way isn't high on that list. A fellow knitter posted a review of a Craftsy course that improved her knitting, helpfully titled "Improve Your Knitting: Alternate Methods and Styles". Ms Lyons (a Lion Brand scion) talks about different ways to hold your yarn and needles (English, Continental, Portuguese) and different ways of mounting the stitches and situations where one method or another (or switching between them - two handed colourwork, knitting back and forth for short-rows rather than turning the work) can make knitting easier.

I've already noticed an improvement in my knitting, though I've only been able to practice the "new" techniques on new projects, not my previously cast on ones as my gauge has changed dramatically. One of the knitters at knit night asked if it might be faster to frog some of my extant projects and start over with the faster method and I almost had to go for a lie-down. Give up on hours and hours of work? Can't do it. I am making a big push to finish off projects so I can just switch and wipe my bad habits from muscle memory.

As a note about Craftsy, I'm a big proponent of TV;DW* and for most things I prefer to learn by reading and looking at some pictures (and doing). I've signed up for a few Craftsy classes, both free and paid-for and I don't think I've watched all of any of them. But knitting - how to make the basic knit or purl stitch - is fundamentally a movement and as a movement it helps to see the motion. So while I'm not particularly a fan of Craftsy, I found this class to be useful. Yes, you can probably look up all the different techniques as free youtube videos but you have to know to look for them and sort out your own pros and cons list for each. In the Craftsy class Ms Lyons has collated it all for me and I can concentrate on figuring out what works for me.

And now if you'll excuse me, I need to pick my next handbag sock project.

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* Too Video; Didn't Watch, a play on TL;DR - Too Long; Didn't Read.

A Knitted Ted (and friends)

For Christmas last year I requested and received a subscription to Knit Now magazine, a British monthly that started exclusively with accessories and quick knits (not to be confused with simple or boring knits) which has branched out to include garments and more time-intensive projects. I'm the world's slowest knitter so I've not knit a lot of the projects (I hoard patterns and wool which I figure means I hoard dreams of projects) but when I saw Bartholomew Bear from Brown-Eyed Babs I wanted it for Little Djinn. Chris gave me the wool for Easter, a super bulky "fur" wool from Erika Knight made from something like 98% (British) wool with just enough nylon to hold it together.

I started it end of May and finished early July, though again I was in California for almost all of June, so really it took just over two weeks. My favourite thing about toys is how quickly they knit up. And there's the gratification of seeing my daughter play with them long after she'd have outgrown a jumper. While the yarn is wonderful and made a fabulous bear, I don't much fancy knitting with it again. Lovely result, but "fun" yarn isn't.

Another project from Knit Now magazine was Finlay Fox by Barbara Prime, which came with yarn as a kit in the June issue. I knit Finlay for Chris as the safety eyes aren't intended for children under 3. That lasted about five minutes. She* looks so clean in these pictures. The live version, having been taken on several adventures including a few to the park and at least one run in with a mud puddle, is somewhat dingier.

I knit her with the kit yarn which I believe is a house label. Finlay went to the October Highland Wool Festival at Eden Court here in Inverness with us and got lots of compliments. I was especially impressed that Little Djinn held her the whole time and never dropped her. Here's a picture of the kit and pattern if you want to see an example of the quality:

The third toy I knit this year was actually the first, Little Lamb from Spud and Chloe Visit the Farm by Susan B Anderson, which I knit for Little Djinn but also to enter in the knitted farm animal competition for the Highland Wool Festival in May at the Dingwall Mart**. She didn't place. She's knit out of North Ronaldsay wool (held double) for her body and Shetland wool for her face and legs. She took a fair time to knit (almost a month) because every other stitch got pulled out to make a twisty loop for her fleece. It was fiddly. Then I finished her one day before the submission deadline so I paid to have her next-day special delivered and then that evening at knitnight I found out that while the webpage still listed the original deadline, it had been extended on their FB page and I'd wasted the money. I'm still fairly irked about that (saying something on FB and not the "real" website).

Rumour has it that the contest for this year upcomming will be tea cosies. I have the pattern for Kate Davie's Sheep Carousel and planned to use the leftover yarn from my Sheep Heid, but I'm worried it wouldn't be the only one submitted (there were three of the same cow toys this year). Things to think about.

All of my toys are stuffed with Jamieson and Smith's wool filling (from which I try and pick the bits of not-fleece). Wool is naturally anti-microbrial, retains warmth, holds lots of water without feeling soggy, and fire-retardant - all good things in general but especially useful when the toys anticipate being loved by a toddler.

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* everything in our house is feminine unless there's an actual reason it shouldn't be, such as Peter the Team GB lion with a full mane. Finlay, despite the masculine name, lacks gender markings.

** hey, two Highland Wool Festivals in one year! Result! though the October one this year was, I think, under-advertised and I would be surprised it it happens again next year. That said I was surprised it happened this year and as long as it's here in Inverness I'll be attending.

Red Rosemorran

Back in February I think it was, The Scrumptious Collection, Vol 3 by Fyberspates* came out and, as there often is, a blog-tour with give-aways at each stop happened and I was lucky enough to win a copy**. It is a really beautiful book, both physically (page layouts) and conceptually (patterns) and my only problem was deciding what to cast on. I loved the Kenwyn hat and cowel, and needed a hat to match last winter's purchase of a dark teal (they call the colour "petrol" here) coat, but I saw there is a contest on the Fyberspate's rav group where the first person to complete any of the patterns in the book with the suggested yarn would win the yarn to knit any of the other patterns in the book. I had the yarn for Rosemorran in my stash and I wanted a summer cardigan for our changeable Scottish weather so I thought, Perfect! and in March I cast on.

Are you laughing yet? I'm laughing. I thought I could cast on a cardigan in March and finish in time to wear it over the summer? Hahahaha, no. I didn't work on it at all when I was in California for three weeks, and I occasionally knit other small things like a sheep for the Highland Wool Festival competition, but it was my main project and I just finished it last week, in October. Yeah, world's slowest knitter strikes again.

I made a few modifications, most notably using Custom Fit to get a cardigan that would fit me perfectly, without having to work out my own modifications to the pattern. Lazy, yes. Worth it, oh yeah. I took the basic shape from the pattern (long sleeves, crew neck, ribbing lengths for cuffs, hem, and collar, knit the stitch pattern, knit my tension square/guage swatch, washed and blocked it, then entered the size and weight along with the number of stitches and rows I needed for the pattern repeat and using my measurements, I got a custom pattern for a custom cardi. Custom Fit even estimated how much yarn I'd need (though I've not weighed the finished jumper to see how close it was and it has buttons now).

Seven months of knitting later, and I've got my jumper! There was a little problem with the buttons, namely I had eight of them and 10 button holes and when I went back to the shop where I bought them they were (gasp) sold out, but I'd used two on a cardigan Little Djinn has outgrown and I was able to find it in the retired clothing box, cut off the buttons, and add them to my jumper.

Is it perfect? No. I should have gone down a needle size on the ribbing to tighten it up. The shoulders aren't perfect - are they too wide? are the arm holes too big? Are they perfect but the weight of the jumper is pulling them down? I'm not sure. I may sew a ribbon on the inside of the button bands to add stability, and possibly under the shoulders as well. but it's beautiful and it follows my curves perfectly. So much better than I could have done on my own, even knowing intellectually how to "do the math" to adapt a sweater.

Oh, and the contest to knit the sweater first? Someone else knit it first, of course. Winning the book and having a wonderful cardigan will just have to satisfy me.

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*rav link because a quick google didn't turn up a page for the book itself and the listing on Fyberspates website isn't as good as the rav page.

** my winning strategy? I only entered once (I didn't want to accidentally win more than once), but I entered on a blog with a smaller following.