Late night musings on the knitting year ahead...

Because who doesn't need a gratuitous cupcake picture? For the record, this is what my work-mates get when they behave themselves...


Perhaps it's just a beginning-of-the-year thing, but over the last few days, I've found myself thinking more about the things I'd like to knit this year (why yes, I am a little obsessed, thank you for asking, and help yourself to tea and biscuits on the way out). Obviously we knitter-type-people do this a lot in terms of seeing patterns online, or garments worn by people on the street, which then cause us to get inspired and start trying to knit or replicate the design. But this time I've found myself thinking less of specific patterns and more about themes/basic elements.

So for the record, in the year ahead I'd really like to try and knit:

More cables.
Or more to the point, more traditional cables. While I did dabble in cablework over the course of last year (my Gathered Pullover being the most recent example, and who can forget the never-ending saga that was my Sylvi), it was not exactly conventional cablework. I adore both of these designs, but I think that I'd really like to try something a little more basic. I have an entire book of aran and cable patterns on my knitting shelf - it's really about time I cracked it open and got stuck in.

Stripes.
I worked a bit with stripes last year, but it was generally in a minor way, an uninteresting way, or with a self-striping yarn which to me isn't really entirely the same thing. None of these really scratched my itch at any rate, so I see more stripes in my future. *sigh* Better start perfecting that whole jogless stripes in the round thing, Anna...

Shawls.
As I mentioned during the write up for my Wandering the Moor, shawls and I didn't see eye to eye for a very long time. I had knitted a couple of shawls before, and although I'd put quite a lot of work into them (*cough* my Luna Moth Shawl *cough*), I never really wore them all that much. Mostly because I couldn't figure out how to wear them, or because I didn't have anything that went with them, and so on. But over the last few months I have actually found myself wearing both of the above mentioned shawls, so a part of me is itching to explore this area a little further, now that I know that the fruits of my hard work aren't just going to languish in my cupboard.

More Basics:
Wonderfully coloured knitwear is all well and good, but sometimes you just don't feel like cranking out something as vivid as a lot of my garments seem to be. Sometimes it's just a little too early in the morning. Given my bleedingly obvious penchant for making clothes, it's kind of galling to end up resorting to some dodgy black jacket that I bought from Target, just because I want something neutral and un-attention-grabbing. So, in order to alleviate this, I would very much like to knit some nice, wearable pieces in greys, blacks, subdued blues and greens, maroons, and so on. With an emphasis on the wearable: I'm not going to start a new paragraph for this because I am seriously thinking about devoting an entire post to it in the near future, but I want to knit more wearable things. Most of the things that I knitted last year I have worn, and worn a lot, and I would like to continue that way. I enjoy the knitting process, really I do, but I equally, I want to knit things that I will love wearing, and not look at guility every time I open my drawers, only to pass over it for the fiftieth time.

There are other priorities - more handknitted socks because my existing pairs are falling apart, more hats, more gifts for other people (because really I'm not sure I actually need as many knitted garments as I am ending up with as a result of this hobby!), and so on. But those are the big four. Let's see how I go!




In conclusion, here is a project that I finished before I went away but forgot to blog about earlier. It's a mildly ridiculous hat that I made from the wool/alpaca blend yarns that I acquired at the Bendigo Sheep Show last July (purple and brown stripes, but the picture completely and utterly fails to convey this fact). I'm quite happy with how it turned out - originally I was going to do something original, but in the end I got complacent and basically just turned it into a Felicity style hat. I don't regret this. And please excuse the sunglasses - I don't know why I'm wearing them indoors (and for that matter, I don't know why I decided to take a picture in the bathroom either). Go ahead, mock away...

Bendigo!

Well, as previously mentioned, last weekend was the Bendigo Sheep Show. Hurrah!

I got up ridiculously early on Saturday morning in order to make my train. Okay, perhaps 5:30am is not ridiculously early, but it was definitely earlier than I would have liked. Getting to the train station was a bit of debacle, because I got to the path I usually take, and subsequently found that there was no more path - only a construction site where the path had previously been. Whoops. There was a lot of blundering around in the dark and a little bit of fence hopping, but I got there eventually, and with my biscuits still intact, no less. That, my friends, is what we call hardcore!

Thankfully, once we (we being myself and Rowena, the day's partner in knitting crime) got on the train, everything ran smoothly. The trip up was uneventful - there was a lot of fog, so the view from the train was pretty uninteresting, although I did see kangaroos at one stage (which might have been interesting if I hadn't grown up in this country and spent enough time outside the city that a kangaroo has long since ceased being novel, but I'll stop being snarky now, shall I?). Knitting was done, and biscuits were ingested!




The actual show was good fun. There was lots to see and touch, and lots of shiny nice yarny things to buy. We got to see a lot of Ravelry people, which was awesome, if a little surreal at times (it's a little unnerving when a random stranger identifies the pattern you used to make your cardigan when there is a grand total of three square inches of said cardigan peeking out from under your coat). I, for what it's worth, got to see a couple of completed Sylvi coats!

Now, for your viewing pleasure, and proof that it all happened, here is me being an idiot with a cardboard alpaca cutout. Because, let's face it, I am an idiot some of the time.




And look! It hardly rained at all!




Anyway, an awesome time was had. I got to play with sheep and alpaca, find out more about natural dyeing (which ties in nicely with a lot of my recent and upcoming experiments), chat with a bunch of lovely people about handspinning and dyeing, and lots of other stuff. Oh, and we also watched the wool fashion parade, which was very amusing, though more for the pained expressions on the male models' faces than anything else (roped in, anyone?).

And then we got on the bus and made our way back to the station. Good day was had!
Look - bus cam! Two degenerate fibre fixated young ladies, full of biscuits, and quite thoroughly worn out!




And of course, I bought stuff. Because it was shiny and nice and that's one of the reasons that you go! I acquired both roving and yarn, which has come back to bite me because my spindle has magically disappeared, and I Can't Find It Anywhere. Seriously, I have spent hours looking for it. Meh. I'm sure it will appear the very moment I purchase a new one. At any rate, here is the haul from the show, frustrated, spindle-lacking fibre and all the rest:




On the left, there's some beautiful spinnables from Stranded in Oz and Ms Gusset (yay Kylie!). I also got bitten by the hand-dyed yarn bug again (sigh, I can't resist it, even though I never know quite what to do with it either), as you can see in the centre - some merino 2ply, also from Stranded in Oz. The purple and brown skeins on the top right are a wool/alpaca blend from one of the stallholders whose name I didn't catch. It's lovely yarn, and looks much nicer in the sun when the subtleties in the colour really come out. And the tiny wee packet on the end (which refused to photograph) is 10g of dyed silk from the Handweavers & Spinners Guild (for me to get my filthy mitts on once I find that bloody spindle...). Definitely enough to keep me busy for a while!

I've been up other things on the crafty front since I got back, but this is such a long post already that I think it might have to wait for another time. Or not at all perhaps - there is another dyeing experiment in the works and I am unsure about how well it will turn out, so if you don't hear about it again, it means that the exercise was a dismal failure and I am trying to block it from my mind! And on that glorious note, I'm off to go for my run.

Busy, busy, busy...

Well, things have been weird around here - a strange blend of busy, yet not busy. More specifically, there has been lots of me making valiant attempts to be constructive, but getting thwarted at every turn. Curse you, foolish reality! Why won't you work the way I want you to?

Anyway, one thing that I have found time to do in between running-around-like-a-crazy-person-to-no-avail is work on my Sylvi. I will make this coat if it kills me. Which it probably will, for the record, provided it is indeed possible to die of convoluted chart poisoning. Anyway, I realised that it was about time to get my arse into gear if I actually wanted to have a chance to wear it this year. I know that it's only mid July, which gives me a good month and a half of winter left, but it takes time to knit a full length coat, you know? And the fickle Melbourne weather does love to thwart me... So I started last weekend and went about it rather vigourously all week. As a result, I am now in possession of two sleeves, and the start of the back:




Doesn't look like much now, but hopefully it will be cool. Or rather, the pattern is definitely rather awesome - I just need to deploy higher/equal levels of awesomeness in order to live up to it. Hopefully this shall occur!

And this is all that has really taken place on the knitting front. There has also been a lot of reading, and a lot of baking - more birthdays and other cake-requiring-occasions than I've been able to shake the proverbial stick at. There was also lemon meringue pie, because I was having a sorry-for-myself day. And whenever I'm down and really don't know what to do with myself, I make lemon meringue pie. You can generally tell how good a year has been by the number of pies I make. For the record, it's now mid July and I've only clocked in at two - this is good!




Mmmm... medicinal pie. I cheated and used a bought base, which is normally the very antithesis of how I go about these things, but on Monday I needed to busy myself with therapy pie more than I needed to buggerise around making pastry. So there. Surely my otherwise exemplary levels of baked-goods production compensate for this little hiccup, yes?



And these little blighters are biscuits for Bendigo (oooh, what delightful aliteration!). Tomorrow, complete with Ravelry buddy and train munchies, I am heading off to the Bendigo Sheep Show like the fibre nerd that I am. It sounds like it's going to be far, far too much fun. I am embarrassingly excited... Full report and hopefully some photos next time.

(disclaimer: photos may or may not contain graphic footage of my biscuit riddled corpse, depending on how hungry I get on the train on the way up there...)