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.

Sockapalooza socks!

The Sockpalsocks have landed a few days ago! My pal was Linda of handknitbyafailedfeminist. Apparently they fit, so yay!

---

I had a pretty crap day yesterday. See, I drive a motorcycle. On my way home from the first day of school, I got caught in a rainstorm. And like that's not enough, when I'm positively soked to the bone, it starts to hail. Oh, and one of the school books I had to go and buy turned out to be the wrong edition. And I couldn't get any sleep last night, mostly due to thunder.

Today didn't start much better; school was pretty boring, and I had to run some errands afterwards. All I'n saying is that I'm too much of a spaz to handle a backbag, a motorcycle jacket and a motorcycle helmet and to sign receits all at the same time. I made a total fool of myself, yayz. Also I was sweaty and overheated and so, so tired.

Buuut then, when I get home, this had come in the mail!



My Sockapalooza socks! Along with the gorgeous, gorgeous socks, there was this awesome post card with instructions on making a sock monkey on it and a notebook. I love notebooks!



My pal is Laura of Affiknitty. The yarn is, apparently, Cider Moon Glacier in June Carter. The colours are absolutely gorgeous, and the fit is great! I'm using way too many exclamation marks! (I love the ribbon, too. It has "I wonder who's knitting for me?" written on it, and these really cute balls of yarn.)



Picots! Slipped stitches! Swirlies! The colours! Eeee!

(That is to say, THANK YOU LAURA YOU ARE MY NEW FAVOURITE PERSON.)

WIP follow-ups

I got my Ravelry invite a week or so back! I only now had time to play with it, and wow. Ravelry = more fun than a barrel of monkeys. It also spurred me to dig up all the pretties in my stash and take new photos of my old WIPs. If you've already got Ravelry, I'm Prologi. Come say hi!

Now. Projects. You might remember the pink sweater I was working on a while back. I'm now halfway through the waist increases. I'm loving the cable and all that pink. I'll probably do double-knit hems on the sleeves and the body, using a contrasting chocolate brown yarn inside the hem. I already have the other yarn in my stash.



I've started another sock to fill the void left by the Sockpal Sock. I decided to try a toe-up this time. I'm working with Wendy's generic toe-up sock pattern, the version with so much detail it probably makes some people twitch.



This is a sock of many firts. It's my first time knitting from the toe up, with self patterning yarn and with short-row toes and heels. The Regia 4-fädig Jacquard Color I'm using is incredibly blah, somehow, and the sock's all stockinette, so I'm calling 'em the Boring Socks, despite there being nothing boring about the knitting.

Why yes, I am a stockinette-in-the-round sort of knitter. I like simple. So, understandably, I become verrry very slow when knitting something more involved. Like this Branching Out scarf.



It's knit out of some delightfully lime Sandnes Garn Kitten Mohair, on wood 6mm straights.



(One more photo of that and a ton of yarn photos on the Flickr and on Ravelry.)

FO: Sockpal Socks

Pattern: stitch pattern from Handpaint Highlight socks in One-Skein Wonders, otherwise fudged together by me
Yarn: Colinette Jitterbug in Toscana, one skein
Needles: 2,5mm bamboo DPNs (actually four bamboo DPNs and one aluminium, because I'm a klutz)

That pictue is truly awful, but it's the best I have of the completed socks.

I had to fudge around with these quite a bit. I'd knit with Jitterbug once before, and didn't have any problems with yardage. However, I'd heard a lot of people say there wasn't quite enough for a proper pair, and my Sockpal had size 10 feet. To solve my problem, I did a provisional cast-on, knit the heel and down to the toe, and picked up for the leg. Turns out that I needn't worry, really. The foot on these babies is a bit over ten inches long, and when folded in half at the heel the leg pretty much matches. The scraps on the table are all the yarn I had left.

Now, the smart among you might notice that this is a pattern with slipped stitches. Slipped stitches for elongated vees, especially when they're slipped over two rounds. Anyone seeing the problem here? Why yes, the vees run in opposite directions on the foot and on the leg. I'm calling it a design element.

Now, the yarn. I'm terribly fond of Jitterbug, mostly because it's the only "fancier" sock yarn I have access to. When I bought the Toscana, I thought it was a nice, earthy green-brown with a few splashes of colour. Yeah, well, no. I still rather like it, and hope the recipient does too. (And doesn't mind the minuscule amount of purple the yarn has. I swear I didn't notice!)

I've actually knit this sock three times. I ended up ripping the first foot I had completed, because my gauge was way too tight and the sock had a strange pointy toe. I also had to knit enough bits of the leg over and over again to make up a whole one. I'm still not sure if I got it entirely right. I hope the socks aren't too narrow and too long like I'm afraid they are.

Also, as I was a twit I didn't remember to look up a good bind-off. I did a super-loose suspended bind-off with larger needles, and it seems to have worked.

(Random detail: the knits on the ribbing are twisted. I like the way it looks, and when stretched, it sometimes looks sort of like p2-k1-p1-k1 ribbing instead of the k2-p2 it actually is.)

High as a kite

I´m finally back from my exile to our summer place. School starts in a week or so, and of course the summer has been cold and damp until now.

I took the Sockpal Sock to a Harry Potter line party. (Geekflag!) I had to make dad drive me to the nearest resonably sized city, but boy was it worth it. I was twenty-third in line, and probably among the first 150 to get their hands on it in Finland. They started selling the books at 2:01am, but only in six places nationwide. (Our 2am is the same as Britain's midnight.) There were roughly 75 of us there.



The Sock felt that I really should be paying more attention to it than to a stupid book, but I ignored it and read the book straight through. (I was finished 26 hours after I got it in my paws, but actual reading time was more like 16 hours.) It was rather good, wasn't it? I didn't like the epilogue all that much, but man were the names hilarious.



The best thing about the summer being all windy and cold was this:



Kites! I love kites!



(That's me trying to keep it in the air. I managed for quite a while, but then of course the kite nose-dived straight into a birch.)

Can anyone tell me what this is? How about you there, in the back?



Why yes indeed, those are the guts of a typewriter! Specifically, of my "portable" Adler. (I got it from a recycling centre for three euros last summer.) The Sock found it work very well as a lounger.



The Sock also got to see (and hear) some motor sports: Neste Oil Rally in Jyväskylä, Finland. I went with my dad. It was quite a road trip, and I had a ton of fun. (Except when I noticed that all the needles had come off from the sock. Thank god for life lines. I don't even usually use them with socks.)



But the time for the Sock to leave finally came, and I shipped it off yesterday. (Better FO post forthcoming.)



(I added stuff after taking this, but nothing major.)

Also, eye candy.



That's my button stash. Everything, including the bowl, is from a trift store or a recycling centre. I'm guessing that the lot have cost less than two euros in total. Gotta love trift stores. (My favourite is the huge on in the centre. So lovely.)

The Adventures of the Sockpal Socks

I lose at updating! \o/

I spent a week in Greece in the beginning of June. Athens=total geekgasm. We only spent a day there, and then went to this wee island. We were apparently just about the only tourists there. :D (Island's called Agistri, and is apparently fairly popular with the Greek.) Sidenote: though we only spent a week there, I took over a thousand pictures.



Then I spent three weeks working. It was supremely boring but hey, yarn money! (Mostly I crawled under desks and wrote down the serial number of every computer. That was the fun part.)

Then there was Midsummer. I took the Sockpal Sock to see the midnight sun on the longest day of the year. (Actually this is sort of the one-o´clock-in-the-morning sun, but still.)



The photo's from our summer place. We have this tiny cottage two hours away from our house by a little lake, surrounded by cows.

The sock also got to see a traditional Finnish Midsummer bonfire, naturally from a safe distance. We skipped the traditional getting obscenely drunk part, though.



Before returning to the urban environment, the Sock and I took a moment to smell the flowers. (For some reason, I think the Sock looks amazingly good in this one.)



I've finished the first sock, and cast on for the second one after serious procrastination. I'll only manage to mail them on August 6th, so they might be a little late. I hope the Sockpal doesn't mind.

I'm also re-knitting a seamless top-down raglan I was working on a while back. I had finished the body and most of a sleeve, but then I realised that I despised the sweater's guts and ripped it all out.



(The sweater's the pink lump in the background. In front of it there's a cup of tea, because I love tea. Happens to be my favourite kind of tea, too, just like Earl Grey but with lemon.)

I'm going to spend the next three weeks at the summer place, with minimal to no internet access. I'm taking the pink sweater, the Sockpal Socks, the yarn for a cardigan and a lace scarf with me. And an insane amount of books.

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.)

Still no knitting content, but my wrist is getting better, so yay.

I got the info of my Sockapalooza 4 pal, and am going to buy some appropriate yarn as soon as I get a chance.

See, the universe decided to deliver some cosmic smackdown, so I have a terrible cold. And it had to happen when we had two days off from school. So I spent my First of May holiday lying on the sofa, keening pitifully and blowing my nose. SUCH FUN. (I did go to Grandma's birthday party yesterday, but that was only to get my sister to come too so the grandparents wouldn't be disappointed. I was stubling around, trying to toss on some proper clothes and beat my hair into some semblance of submission when I got a massive nosebleed. I went anyway, and was very careful to not bleed on the carpet.)

I've noticed that since I haven't been able to knit for two weeks, because my wrist is still being a biatch, my attention span has reverted to that of a five-year-old on crystal meth. I can't sit still or concentrate on anything for more than five minutes at a time, and I've had to take up chewing gum all the time again, because otherwise I chew the insides of my mouth to bits. Argh.

I think I might start posting about my knitting books or something. I only have five, but at the rate I post I think they'll last a while. :D

No No Sheep for me.

I haven't been able to knit for a bit over a week now. I think I have tendonitis or something, because my right wrist hurts like all get-out. I have to take notes by hand at school, and all I can say is ouch. I use the mouse with my left hand, so at least that's not making it worse.

Because I haven't been able to knit, I've of course have several ideas of things I want to knit. Oh, and I bought a knitting book yesterday.

The book's Amy Singer's No Sheep for You, and I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but oh my god the eye candy. I'm rather in love.

My love, however, is diminished by the fact that there's some sort of a major screw-up in the book: pages 82 through 97 have been replaced with pages 66 through 81. This means that I don't have the patters for Manly Maze, Sweet Indulgence or The Bag or the full-page photo of the ganseys, but three of the patterns and the big Maze photo twice. I'm all sorts of pissed off. I checked the Interweave site and did a quick Google, but nothing turned up. I tried finding an e-mail address I could use to contact Interweave to see what the hell was up, but no such luck. I'll probably take the book back to the store and see if they'll have it. That was their only copy, so I'll just have to survive without it. Insert sad face here.

FO: Motherfucking Snakes on a Motherfucking Sock

Excuse my French.



The pattern: Snakes on a Sock, by Miss Lime of Lime & Violet. (I do wish they had links to the pattern(s) in their sidebar.)
The yarn: Colinette Jitterbug in Jay
The needles: 2,5mm for the leg and foot, 2mm for the heel, bamboo. (And one aluminium 2,5mm, becaue I lost one of the bamboo set.)



I love colour. I love the fit. I've worn them for several days, even inside my shoes, which is a first for me.

The second sock is a bit larger than the first one, even though they're worked over the same number of stitches and rounds. Apparently my gauge gets looser toward the end of projects.

Also, the pattern is lovely. It's easy enough to knit even when you can't look at your hands, and the repeats repeat in a wonderful, logical, orderly manner, which pleases my geeky brain. During one of my weaker moments I hit an error in the pdf and left a comment. I swear the reply I got from Lexy the admin monkey broke all kinds of laws of physics, because I got it the second I clicked the submit button. Later, Miss Lime also emailed me, too. (It wasn't anything I couldn't have figured out myself. I was a bit sleep deprived.)



A better look at the stitch pattern. (Also I really rather like this photo.) Please excuse all the crap on our deck.

My stash is bloating. Not that I mind.

Now, I go to Upper Secondary school. I guess. I've always been a bit fuzzy about such things. Anyway, around here the school year is divided into five periods with different subjects and courses and stuff. We have all the exams, up to seven, during seven consecutive days, but nothing else. That means so much free time it's only barely funny. (You're supposed to study for upcoming exams, but I simply can't spend that much time reading the books over and over again without going crazy, and I do pretty well anyway.) That, in turn, means that I have the time to go to yarn stores.

So, yes, most of this post is going to be complete yarn pr0n. Yay!



Two balls of Regia sock yarn. Of course I managed to get two different weights, but I think I can mess around with needle sizes enough to make it work. I'm going to have to hunt for a ball of yellow and a ball of turquoise, so I can make the Tiptoe socks. The green I'm going to get from the leftovers of this ball:



That's a one-hundred-gram ball of OnLine (OnLinie?) Supersocke in a really, really great green. I visited one of the three yarn stores I go to, with no intention of buying anything, but then I saw this, and, well, I can never resist a good green. It's going to become a pair of Pembrokeshire Pathways socks.

The store I got that from is the smallest of the three, but they have lots of good, cheap sock yarn. The second one has Colinette Jitterbug and Skye and some basic yarns in tons of colours. The third one, which is my favourite, is the largest, the farthest away, and the only one that stocks Rowan. (I'm a Rowan Ho, can you tell?)

This is from the second one.



Colinette Jitterbug in Mardi Gras. Jitterbug is the only handpaint available around here, so it's a good thing I love the yarn itself as much as I do. (I just finished my Snakes on a Sock, FO post forthcoming.)

And this is from the third shop.



A ball of Rowan Felted Tweed. I bought this for swatchy purposes, mostly because I didn't have enough money to buy an entire cardigan's worth. Eventually, though, I'm going to knit Mrs. Darcy with it. I have no chance of getting gauge, but I'm not afraid of a tiny bit of math. I actually rather love math. :D

I think a part of why I love Rowan so much is their ballbands. So wonderful. (Also, Finnish craft mags occasionally translate Rowan patterns, and I've loved most of them so far.) I was going to see if I could persuade myself to buy a cheaper yarn that has the exact same fibre content as the Felted Tweed, but it was just so much uglier. Oh well.

I have actually done some knitting, too. I finished the socks I was working on, for example, and cast on the Felted Tweed, and worked on Tempting II. Photographic evidence:



I'm most of the way through the body and still a bit worried about running out of yarn. I think it'll be enough, though.



It's a Topi hat. I knit it in two days and did a few mods to be able to call it a swatch.

I knit the top as set, though with more increases, and then knit the straight part flat. I was halfway down the brim when I realised I had skipped a bit of the instructions. At that point, I safety-pinned the hat together and tried it on. The result? It looked like a shower cap. My flat gauge and circular gauge are so drastically different the hat flared out and was then pulled back in by the ribbing. That and the screwy brim were all it took to make me rip it. Of course, it took me an entire James Bond movie to un-tangle the ball and wind it into a center-pull ball by hand. How I managed to knot it that badly I'll never know. I'm just special that way, I guess.

Most random photo ever:



It's my tape measure. Yes, I only have one. Yes, I've had to for a few years. I'm fairly certain I'm going to lose it sometime in the near future, because I simply can't keep track of my things. Also, it's starting to fall apart.