Random Sunday!

Clearly I'm the worst blogger in the world. Oh well.

1. I missed the Silent Poetry Reading, apparently. Here, have some Emily Dickinson anyway.

Hope is a strange invention —
A Patent of the Heart —
In unremitting action
Yet never wearing out —

Of this electric Adjunct
Not anything is known
But its unique momentum
Embellish all we own —

2. My throat feels like I've swallowed a cactus.

3. I've dropped way more money on yarn than is appropriate lately. Stuff I've bought, oddly enough solely from Käsityötalo Priima in Helsinki (I need to rambe about yarn stores sometime):



Colinette Jitterbug in Monet. Oh my.



Sandnes Garn Mandarin Petit in possibly the greates blue ever. I cast on something with it, but I don't know whether it looks like arse or not. Also the picture was useless.



Twilleys of Stamford Freedom Spirit, 10 balls. Enough for a sweater, I think.



Colinette Point 5 in Sahara. Two skeins of PRETTY.

4. Speaking of PRETTY, this happened within two days of me getting my paws on that yarn:



Pattern: Painfully simple. Cast on some stitches, knit 2x2 rib until you run out of yarn. Bind off.
Yarn:Colinette Point 5 in Sahara, two skeins
Needles: telephone poles 12mm plastic straights

I love this scarf. It's really long (longer than my wingspan, at least, which admittedly isn't teribly long) and warm and pwetty. The yarn is really bulky, and I love thick-and-thin thing going on. The whole scarf took me maybe four hours, spread over two days.

The colourway is amazing. I also think it's funny how Colinette colourways look nothing at all alike on different base yarns. I usually love all of them. Here, for example, the colour is sort of subdued and vaguely brown, and on Jitterbug Sahara is a colour I believe experts call Really Fucking Orange.

5. I need more bookmarks.

6. I went through my button stash and did something that vaguely resembles organising. I took pictures and dumped it all back in.





7. I've fallen in love with steampunk. Again. (My second NaNoWriMo novel was steampunk. Seriously shitty stempunk, but still.)

I blame this necklace, which I found on sale for four euros last week:



The photo is horrible, but it's a black fake clockface with silver numbers and hands, with a silver gear hanging from it. I love it.

I'm not dead!, and an FO

Here I would like to insert my best impression of that one scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now, knitting. I've been hindered by my wrist being a bitch, and by NaNoWriMo. This is my fourth year, and fourth win, in a row. Yay! As a reward for writing those 50 000 words, I bought myself the knew IK and Yarn Harlot's new book. Or, well, not that new, but still. My parents completely failed to grasp why anyone would pay money to read knitting humour. :D

Sad news first: You remember my Snakes on a Sock? Yeah, well, there is now a big honking hole in the heel on one of them. Sad face. I should see if I can darn it, but it's a really huge hole and I didn't have that much leftovers. And also I'm a bit too lazy to bother, probably.

I have been knitting, but not a lot. I've been working on the Pink Sweater or whatever I called it the last time I talked about it. The body is done, all it needs is a sleeve and a half.

Also, Christmas. Sorry, no, you can't deny it anymore. Me, I'm knitting all my family and friends sweaters for Christmas. I just started a few days ago. No, I'm not clinically insane, nor am I terribly delusional. I hope.

The sweaters are going to look like this:



Can you find? This brings back memories from my childhood; I had one of those books and I loved it to bits. Anyway, I didn't have the heart to cut all my stuff out of the picture. Plus you can sort of see the scale better this way.

The yarn is Garnstudio Silke Tweed, knit on some random aluminium DPNs I had lying around, maybe 2 or 2,5 mm. Pattern, if you can call it that, is my own. Basically it's just a simplified top-down seamless raglan. Might write the pattern up if I feel like it later.

Now, for the FO. This should have been one of those things that should take maybe an evening to complete. For me, maybe three weeks. (I have to admit that I only knit a row every now and again, and this is attempt number 3.)



The pattern: My own. I'm calling it Spark, mostly because of the ridiculously wonderful bright colourway.
The yarn: Apparently it's called Naturwolle Multicolor. One of my local yarn stores carries it, it's 100% wool handspun in Germany. The colourways are amazing. This one's called Magma. Used up the whole 100 g hank.
The needles: 6 mm wood straights



(I know the first photo doesn't really show the hat. I just got excited when I saw a photo of me that didn't make me look like an unwashed idiot.)

Spark is a simple cabled hat, knit flat from the top down. The second photo is supposed to show the increases, but the colourway sort of obstructs everything. I love it anyway. Certainly cheers me up when the sun is below the horizon when I leave for school at 8 am or come back at 3 pm. :D



A better view of the stitch pattern. It's a fairly basic six-stitch six-row cable, with some slipped stitches tossed in for good measure, finished off with a 1x1 twisted rib.

I might write this pattern up, too, but I don't know if it'd make any sense to anyone who isn't me.

FO: Topi hat

It's summer! (I believe I can say that now without causing a snow storm or something.)



(Are my photos too dark? I have one of those fancy flat monitors, and it seems to lie about how light things look.)

My wrist is not getting much better, but I can knit a bit every once in a while without destroying it. I'm going to have to be careful, though, because I have six exams during this week and the next and most of them include writing essays. Thank you, Finnish educational system!

Remember when I vented about my faulty copy of No Sheep? Well, the store did take it back and ordered a new copy from the publisher. I got a proper copy a week or so back, and I loke it to little bits. I read it straight through the first chance I got.

***

I finished Topi way over a month ago, but I kept forgetting to take pictures. I finally had the chance today, so here it is. :D



(Please excuse my dopey expression. That's the best I can do after writing two essays at school.)

Pattern: Topi, from Knitty
Yarn: Rowan Felted Tweed in Phantom (153), less than one ball
Needles: Circulars of a mysterious size. If I had to guess, I'd say 3mm/US2½. Aluminium.



Interestingly enough, I took this photo myself, but I still look like I completely failed to notice the camera.

I knit the hat because I kept getting blinded by the sun while waiting for the bus. It worked up really quickly, and I rather love it. I had a bit of trouble with the cast-on, though, and couldn't figure out the instructions in the pattern, so I did a quick google and found this tutorial, which worked for me.



I really love the way the slipped-stitch rib looks.



I'm also ridiculously fond of the way the top of the hat spirals. The purl ridge is sort of cute, too. (Also, photographing the top of your own head is rather tricky.)



This is what I wore with it when it was a bit colder. It's been too windy lately, and I also got sunglasses with the proper sort of lenses for my eyes. I'm a bit sad the sun washed out the print on my bag; I'm really fond of the bag. (I bought it from the shop at the Science Museum in London. It's got a drawing of an old-school VW Transporter, with bits cut off so you can see some of the guts. It's like this one, but without the text.)