Short cuts

I love taking short cuts. I love thinking you're miles away from the finish and then one quick short cut and presto you're there.

Pattern: Arisaig by Ysolda Teague
Needles: 2.75mm
Yarn: My handspun Shetland in fingering weight
Ravelled: here
Mods: it's sleeveless!



Looking back at my notes in Ravelry I started this almost a year ago (24/07/2009). I made good progress and then got stuck on "sleeve mountain" in November. I did have another go at scaling that particular summit when I picked this up again last week but then decided that life was too short and that I quite wanted a sleeveless top anyway.



I'm especially pleased with the ties which look very neat in 1x1 rib and were nowhere near as soul-destroying to knit as you might think. They really whipped up.



I think that this is the first non-sock or shawl garment that I've knitted from my own handspun and I'm really happy with how it's all turned out. In fact I'm ridiculously proud. I have to restrain myself from going up to people and telling them "I made this, I made this out of fluff!". Hurrah for the miracle of spinning.

Stuck on sleeve mountain

I am stuck halfway up sleeve mountain. I have been knitting on the first sleeve of the Arisaig cardigan for the length of a bible.



I'm a bit further on than this now but it feels like I'll never reach the top. Some people might say persevere, struggle on. Me, I'm taking a little break and knitting a hat instead. I'm knitting the lyrically named 115-12 a - Hat with lace pattern from Drops Design using some of the beautiful Artist's Palette Buttersoft DK that Juliet gave me earlier in the year. It's not that I don't love the grey (at the moment I'm wearing grey tights, grey shoes, grey skirt) but it's lovely to be knitting in technicolour again.

Kicks and flicks

I'm very excited! It's jive week in Strictly and I have new shoes.



They're ecoSneaks from Simple Shoes. I came across them in Schuh this evening and I was rather taken with their ethical policies and use of recycled materials (including old tyres and milk cartons). However, I have to confess that although I love the idea of ethical shoes the main factor was that I loved the pink laces against the grey suede and thought that they'd look rather fabulous with my collection of knee length skirts.



Now all I need are the fabulous stripy grey tights I saw in M&S earlier.

I'm also very excited about the OGWSD guild meeting tomorrow. It feels like ages since the last guild meeting in the summer so I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone and settling down to some quality time with the wheel. I've got some Shetland singles on the wheel which I'm about halfway through plying and I think I'll take along the Welsh grey and Massam fibre to go into my British sheep breeds handspun blanket. This isn't because I'm running out of Shetland fibre, in fact I think I might already have enough spun and plied for the rest of my Arisaig cardigan and I don't want to have too much two-ply left over - I have already have enough leftovers in my stash.

Autumn days

We had the most glorious October day yesterday. It was so sunny that I was almost too warm sitting outside with my knitting at lunchtime.



I'd been a little concerned that I might struggle a little to find my bearings when I picked up the left front of the Arisaig cardigan after a break of a couple of months but the simple lace pattern and the fact that it's easy to count the increases and decreases by the repeats of the lace meant that I was able to carry on as though I had never left off.

The very steep decreases for the front neckline meant that every row was a little but shorter and I was able to make really good progress before the end of the day. I would have made even better progress if I hadn't got so carried away that I knit about 2 inches past the start of the armhole and had to rip back to the right place (oops!). Having had sizing issues with lace cardigans in the past (yes, I'm talking about you here, Katharine vest) I thought that this would be a good moment to block the back and check that the lace and ribbing really would stretch out to the required dimensions.



Yay! I even held a real piece of clothing up against it to make sure and so can now knit on with confidence.

On fire

Last weekend I sorted out my stash. I bought four under-the-bed storage boxes from the local supermarché and put all the yarn, fibre, and half-finished projects into them. I even had a system - box one is for stash yarn (surprisingly this is the fullest box), box two contains fibre and handspun, box three has WIPs and UFOs*, and box four is the location for finished objects (mostly as-yet-ungifted items and my shawl collection). The main aim behind the operation stash was to clear up some space in the corner of the living room which had been pretty much taken over by plastic bags of miscellaneous yarn and to ease my lurking fear that the carpet moths** which haunt our bedroom would tire of the all-carpet diet and seek out new prey.

However the exercise has had some unexpected benefits in that seeing all my WIPs and UFOs (and there aren't quite as many as I'd thought) in one place has really motivated me to work on them. Just this week I have finished off two pairs of socks, nearly finished the striped yoke baby cardigan, finished one mitten, and made really good progress on the second.



Remember these guys? I last knit on the Pomatomus socks (below) around the time of Woolfest. I had got as far as the heel of the second sock when I got so enthused by the whole British wool thing that I put them down for a while and then they always seemed just a bit too tricky to take up again afterwards. In fact it took just two days' knitting to finish them off and I was weaving the ends in by Thursday evening this week.

The handspun Monkey socks (above) were spun and knit on a schedule to be displayed at Megan's stand at FibreFest at the end of August. I was so pleased when I finished them a whole day before I was due to hand them over to Megan, then slightly less pleased when I realised that I'd somehow missed a whole repeat out of the second sock, d'oh! They might have been good enough to display but they weren't good enough to wear and they hung around in a paper bag with the leftover yarn for a whole month before bringing them out into the light motivated me to sort them out. These took only a couple of hours to finish off.



This baby cardigan was heading towards UFO-dom as I was afraid that I would run out of the cream yarn before I reached the cuffs, let alone the button bands. However, I faced up to my fears, ripped out my swatch and managed to finish both sleeves with the remaining yarn, phew! I don't think that there's enough left in the ball to make a button band so I plan to find a zipper in either pink or brown to match the stripes and finish the front edges in that colour. My niece just loves zipping and unzipping the zippers on anything from mummy's fleece jacket to her own sleeping bags so I think she'll be thrilled to have her very own zip-up cardigan. I just need to find a nice big zipper with a chunky toggle that her little fingers can grab onto.



Finally I popped these flip top mittens into my knitting bag along with the striped cardigan to work on on my trip up north this weekend. I started the first mitten in Geneva at the end of August and had started the second by the time our plane landed at Heathrow but I had to suspend work on them as soon as I got home in order to work on the Sheep Yoke baby cardigan for Clara. Now I'm down to the cuff on the second mitten which just leaves around twenty rows of ribbing, the thumb, and the finishing to go.

The really exciting thing is that once the mittens and the zipper for the cardigan are done this only leaves a Trellis cardigan to be sewn up and a fingerless mitten project to be completed before I can concentrate on the WIP I really want to get back to, my handspun Shetland Arisaig. Either that or I can create a whole new load of WIPs.

* the difference between WIP (work in progress) and UFO (unfinished object) can seem a subtle one to non-knitters but if you've not picked up the needles for a month or more then you're definitely heading towards Area 51.

** this is a big admission for any knitter to make as fibre-eating beasties are the STDs of the knitting world.

A hiatus

The enforced interruption on the sheep cardigan does mean that I've been able to catch up a bit with my Arisaig.



Oddly enough - given that I've been struggling to photograph this sucker ever since I started it - this photo, taken in artificial light and with a flash gives a pretty good impression of the colour of the cardigan in daylight. I love the Shetland yarn so much. Knit at this gauge it's just so damn springy - there's nothing worse after all than limp ribbing.

I've had a horrible cough all this week (think bronchial sheep) so I took it easy this evening*. I ate last night's leftover stew (pork with cider, tomatoes, and mushrooms) for dinner followed by a chocolate cake from Maison Blanc whilst watching (again) a well-known blockbuster based on a well-known best-selling novel. I have to say I enjoyed it hugely.

Tomorrow is a busy day. I've got to head up to Headington in search of needles (especially after receiving a hurry up text from my sister) then it's off to Wallingford with some fellow quilters in search of fabric for a sample square and hopefully some buttons for the cardigan - I'm really looking forward to it. I hope you all have fun weekend plans too and have a great weekend.

* at least I took it easy after I got back from my run anyway.

Grey lace on a grey morning

So grey, in fact, that the only way I could get any decent shots of Arisaig in progress was to squish it onto the window sill in the study on the side of the flat where the sun, if it had decided to put in an appearance this morning, would have been.



But whereas the grey outside is just flat and depressing, in fact the sky is really white rather than grey, the grey lace is far from that. The handspun yarn has a lovely springy texture and the colour of the natural grey Shetland fibre is full of subtleties.



Another cause for happiness is that, although you can't see it from these shots, I am onto the very last row of lace before the back shoulder shaping which means that the back is almost done. This does, of course, mean that shortly I'll be back onto knitting 2x2 rib on the tiny tiny needles for the fronts but it makes such a lovely crisp fabric that it's really worth it.

Starting small

I'm so excited about knitting Arisaig that I couldn't even wait to finish spinning the yarn before I cast on.



The pattern starts off with 10 rows of 2x2 rib on tiny needles (2.25mm). I only have this size in a pair of Prym metal straights.



These are the suckers that the airlines have in mind when they tell you that knitting needles are dangerous objects. It's going to be a relief to finish my ten rows and move onto the relatively chunky size of 2.75mm I can tell you.

Some fibre, a plan, a wheel, arisaig!

Ok so it doesn't have an internal rhyme and it's not a palindrome but it's a snappier title than "Nain otalgia sir, an arisaig Latonian"* which is the only palindrome I could devise containing "arisaig".

I've been wanting to knit this ever since I first started reading Knitty but I've never had enough of the right yarn at the right time.



Then just last week I realised that I had more than enough grey Shetland fibre to spin the fingering weight yarn needed for the project and that I'd already spun up some gorgeous blue Shetland in the same weight for the tie and edging which are done in a contrast colour.

I'm really excited both at the thought of finally knitting (and wearing) Arisaig and at creating a whole non-sock garment from my handspun.

* It's English, Jim, but not as we know it. Nain (my own) otalgia (earache) sir, an arisaig Latonian (pertaining to Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana). I suppose Diana could be telling Apollo to stop playing music for a moment and admire the wrap cardigan she's knitted for mother. It does get nippy up in the Greek highlands.