Sisyphus knits

The problem with knitting on the train (apart from the blue fingers when the train doesn't turn up) is that it is prone to interruption and distraction. This is fine if you're knitting mindless miles of stocking stitch, or something with clear repeats where you can easily figure out where you're up to, but less so with anything remotely fiddly.

For the last month or so (it seems like more), I have been trying to knit a pair of bootees for a friend of my sister's who was expecting a baby. Note the "was" - baby has now arrived. The father is a childhood friend of both of ours though closer to my sister, so the deal was she would buy nice Australian merino and I would knit them. The work of a moment or so I thought. However...

First I tried to find a pattern to work with the fine 3ply yarn but couldn't find anything that wasn't ugly or excessively girly (at this stage we didn't know the sex of the baby so I was trying for something unisex - a slightly tall order given the amount of pink in the yarn). I was also instructed that they should ideally be bootees and not socks. I tried various patterns and versions of patterns but they all produced miserable little curled up things because the yarn wasn't thick enough. I knitted, I crocheted, I frogged and frogged again; it would not cooperate.

Finally baby appears on the scene (still booteeless) and is a girl. Hurrah, think I - Saartje's bootees. I knit one in record time throwing in a little bit of kidsilk spray (vino) to give a nice pink fuzz and am very pleased with it.


I embark on the second and run out of kidsilk spray before I reach the appropriate point. Nuts! I spend my lunch hours scouring every yarn shop in the district (all two of them) to no avail. It is now less than a week before the bootees are expected and I don't have time to order yarn from elsewhere or go further afield to buy any. No one I know has any spare kidsilk in the right colour.

I decide I will just have to start again and make a matching pair without the kidsilk spray. In the remaining two days of the week I frantically knit one bootee each day on the train to and from work because it is the only free time I have. Come to sew them up last night and the bootee curse strikes again; I find I have made two (different) mistakes, one on each bootee so they don't match.

I now have about a third of the ball of yarn left and 4 different bootees, only one of which (the one I can't reproduce) is really presentable, and I have run out of time to make them. Grr.....might as well throw my sticks in the bin, give my stash away to the needy, and give up knitting for good!

Round and round they go

Happy Birthday to me... a very happy birthday indeed since I spent most of it happily playing with my new yarn swift and ball winder (not to mention the generous quantities of new yarn C's mum kindly sent me by way of presentage).

I have been very good because the swift etc. actually arrived early last week (from the Handweavers Studio who were very helpful and got it to me the day after I ordered it) but by dint of will-power and the simple expedient of hardly having any free time at all, I managed not to open it until this morning. C of course couldn't resist the lure of something vaguely technical (either that or he feared my poor little brain would overheat with the excitement) and was soon happily winding away. It was skein number 6 before I even got to have a go!


We started by balling a variety of things I've been saving especially, including the lovely Oxford Kitchen Yarns "Storm" sock yarn (hand-dyed with woad) that I bought at the IKnit Stitch and Bitch day


and the equally lovely Italian mulberry-coloured lace weight that I also bought there.


Then I basically spent the rest of the afternoon working my way through my whole stash, reducing what had been a horrid tangle in a variety of unseemly plastic bags to a stack of gratifyingly neat little cakes.


And they fit in the box and the lid shuts for the first time in months! A Sunday well-spent say I.

Here Kiri, Kiri, Kiri!

Well, after a weekend of concerted knitting, all three are finally done. Still the odd end to sew in, but that doesn't really count.


On the whole I'm very pleased with them, and I hope my sister will be too. She is marrying a New Zealander and will be having New Zealand ferns in her bouquet, hence the original choice of pattern. I haven't got a New Zealand fern, so my asparagus fern will have to do for the purposes of comparison, but it seems fairly ferny to me.

For the third one I used, what I can't help thinking of as "Liz's accidental bind-off" (a method which apparently resulted from a slight misunderstanding, but in fact turned out to be much more successful than the original) and the edge gave me no trouble at all and came out nice and pointy. I am still trying to decide whether I dare try to tink the already-blocked Kiri No. 1 and tweak it to be the same. Not sure that my nerves are strong enough for it really, but I would like them to match. I'll think about it. If I attempt it fairly soon I suppose at a pinch I still have time to make a fourth...


Now all I have to do is get the rest of my outfit together. I have the majority of it but am still on the look-out for what I am told is called a "fascinator" (I reckon it'll be too hot for hats and anyway it's got to be packable). While visiting my mum last week I had a quick look in various likely-looking shops, but without much success. Really what I want is something the same sort of iridescent green as my shirt, but since this isn't one of "this season's" colours I couldn't find anything that matched. In fact the whole selection was somewhat uninspiring and surprisingly pricey. In one shop C proudly presented me with something that looked like the result of an unfortunate encounter between a pheasant and a lawnmower and I was rather taken aback to realize the price ticket said £265! Perhaps I'll get myself a bull-dog clip and some ribbon and then go out and mug a pigeon...

Every cloud?

The last week hasn't been a great one on several fronts. This is one reason for the absence of posts (the other is that my brother is currently colonizing the spare room which is where the computer resides - not that I'm complaining as he's currently cooking me dinner).

Anyway, firstly, I was struck down by the departmental cold and spent all week feeling lousy, though not ill enough to be off work (which is of course how it has established itself as the departmental cold in the first place, since no one feels they can justify being off sick, so we all go in and give it to someone else).

Then I had a series of minor knitting disasters the worst of which was that a combination of violent sneezing and watching Heroes caused me to drop several stitches on Kiri on Thursday night. Much F-ing and blinding ensued. Thank heavens I finally managed to track them all down and pick them up again, but only at the expense of what should have been another repeat.

On top of the cold I've also been suffering from a particularly bad case of trains. Perhaps in response to all the reports on the news about how fat everyone is getting these days, First Great Western seem to have decided it would be a good idea if we all start the day with a brisk run and some step aerobics. To this end they have taken to changing the platform repeatedly at the very last minute. Last Tuesday for instance we all duly trooped across to platform 4 in accordance with the announcement and then watched as our train pulled up to platform 3. About four of us, reasonably sprightly and fleet of foot made it back in time; everyone else got left behind. Since then they have tried the same trick a further four times but we're wise to it now and so everyone clusters at the top of the stairs ready for the last minute "haven't-a-hope-in-hell-if-you're-old-or-need-to-use-the-lift" platform alteration.

However, they did get me on the way back on Wednesday when I left the Bluestockings happily ensconced in the pub and instead spent 45 minutes sitting on the station trying to knit with increasingly blue fingers while the train I was waiting for gradually got later and later until it merged seamlessly into the next one. Meanwhile I listened to a variety of announcements including the old favourite "Please ignore the information screens, they are showing incorrect information" [i.e. we don't know how to work the bloody things and we can't override the automatic announcements which keep contradicting everything we say] and "We apologise for the delay this is due to mmmghf..nmm...rgh... clackety clackety clackety" [i.e. quick here comes a goods train, make the pretend information announcement now].


Nevertheless, as a result of enforced knitting time I did manage to complete the booties I've been making as my "on-train" project (I should probably be grateful to FGW really since their complete inability to run trains to schedule was one of the main motivating forces behind my taking up knitting in the first place). I also made unexpected progress on a Banff sleeve while stuck in traffic on the M6/M42/M40 at the weekend (I feel bound to add that I don't drive and was sitting in the back and not blithely purling along steering with my knees or anything), so all in all my travelling woes haven't been completely without consolation this week. And the cardigan of stripes is also blocked and ready for posting.


Now all I need to do is decide what to make for my sister's best-friend's imminent new baby using the Elizabeth merino 4ply she sent me. All suggestions welcome.

Who let the dogs out?

Well, apparently no one.

The dogs in question belong to our neighbour. There are two of them and they've been barking incessantly since about 8 o'clock this morning (when, presumably he went out), so so much for the lie-in.

When we first moved here and I heard them barking and howling like this, I used to worry that they were doing it because something had happened, like the house was on fire, or he had been taken ill and was lying unconscious, or was trapped down an old mineshaft perhaps. Now I realise it's just because they're shut in on their own and it's the only think they can think of to do. I wish they'd find a quieter way to pass the time though - it drives me nuts! Perhaps I should try to teach them to knit.

Meet the ancestors

Today I finally got my photos from my old yahoo account transferred across to flickr so I've been having fun rediscovering photos I'd forgotten about.

Amongst them are these pictures of (I am reliably informed) two of my great-grandfathers.

You can certainly see where my brother gets his facial hair from!




The remainder of the pictures are mostly from c.2000-2002 when C was living and working just outside Chicago and I went out to stay with him. Most of them were prints which I scanned in so that my parents et al could see them, which accounts for the somewhat grainy quality of some of them.

There are some from our train trip on the California Zephyr which takes two days to go from Chicago to San Francisco through the Rockie mountains. The scenery in the Rockies and the Utah and Nevada deserts was some of the most amazing I've ever seen, partly just because of the sheer scale.


This is the foothills of the Rockies. It doesn't look like much until you realize that the line just below half-way is a huge goods train.


We spent a few days in San Francisco at the end of this trip before flying back to Chicago. San Francisco was great, though it was surprisingly cold, especially down by the sea. Still the fog was very atmospheric, even if it did leave me wishing I'd brought a coat.


This one is of the Gateway Arch in St Louis. C and I drove there for a couple of days from Chicago on Memorial Day weekend (late May).


When we left Chicago it was 42 degrees F; when we got to St Louis it was 86. That day was spring. The temperature never dropped again until the autumn.

Mind you, it is a fair way south of Chicago even though it's only just in the next state. It was a terrifically dull drive as I recall and before my knitting epiphany, so I didn't have anything to do. If there's one thing you can say about Illinois it's that it's flat and there wasn't even any map-reading to keep me occupied. The Mapquest driving directions basically said: Turn left onto N. Joliet road. After 2 miles merge onto I55 south. After 258 miles turn right. You just don't get directions like that in Britain! About half-way we stopped for lunch in a place called Normal. Perhaps appropriately it was perfectly ok but entirely unmemorable. St Louis was nice though (as is Chicago).

Finally there were some pictures from a visit to Greece with my mum and dad in 2002. We went all over the place visiting family and friends that my parents have known since before they were married and mum finally got to go to Delos. She was on her way there (nearly 40 years ago) when she met my dad and got distracted.

I rather like this photo. Spotted on the quay at (I think maybe) Andros, it seems to me like fish-shop with delusions of grandeur!

One down...

Well, Kiri mark one is finally finished.

I am still not 100% happy with the cast off. In the end I tinked back the whole of the cast off and the row before and did them again on much bigger needles. This was more successful - it produced a sort of open edging which I rather like - but it's still not as stretchy as I wanted and consequently the points aren't as pointy as they might be. However, 'tis done, and blocked I think it looks really quite nice.

So, number 1 is done; Liz is racing through number 2 (having completed the same number of repeats in one week that I did in about one month); number 3 is underway, and the deadline seems a bit more manageable now.

I've also finally managed to get to the end of the stupidly stripy stash-busting cardigan, which now just awaits blocking (and posting).

This is probably just as well as, in spite of having only got a small way into my planned stash-bust, at the Knitting and Stitching show on Sunday I managed to acquire ten balls of Jaeger Matchmaker 4 ply and some Colinette Jitterbug, both of which now await inspiration. C was very restrained (perhaps resigned is more the word) when I returned bearing yet more yarn, only asking in a hopefully voice "Is it to make me something?"

He took it manfully when I said no, poor thing. I've been promising to make him something for ages and still haven't quite managed it. It's not that I'm unwilling but he seems to have ideas above his station. No simple raglan jumpers for him. No, what he wants is the saddle-shouldered Elizabeth Zimmerman cabled aran cardigan, the prospect of which I find mildly terrifying. In a vague gesture towards starting it I bought him some buttons... Sadly I only got six and I now see it needs seven. They're very nice buttons though...