Liesl and such...

Well, I'm still alive! Uni is kicking my arse several times a week, but I'm definitely still alive and kicking. Or alive enough to be quite chronically bored by the Acts Interpretation Act anyway (erm, hooray for statutory interpretation, or something...). And my Japanese classes started this week, just in case law school wasn't enough. Japanese looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, though learning how to write hiragana is a challenge - I've done so much Western style calligraphy in my life that the different stroke order (horizontal stroke before vertical) is driving me spare. In a good way though!

Thankfully for my sanity, there have been plenty of developments on the crafty front as well.

For a start, I finally finished my Liesl cardigan:


The nitty gritty: Liesl by Ysolda Teague. Knitted with about 2.3 skeins of Malabrigo Worsted on an 8mm needle.

The colour commentary: I'm mostly happy with how it came out, though I think that I really could have made it a size smaller - you can't see it in this shot, but it's actually a little bit large for me, and therefore not as flattering as it could have been. Also, I'm not entirely sure that this style suits me. Oh well - I'm still mostly happy with it, and I've already worn it, so obviously I don't dislike it that much!

Ha - this project was really me wanting to see what all of the fuss was about. Liesl is such a popular pattern on Ravelry, and people never seem to shut up about Malabrigo either, so this was a good opportunity to suss both of them out. Liesl is a great pattern, for all that I'm not particularly sure that it's quite my style. I wasn't particularly surprised by that though - Ysolda is such a talented designer, and I'm never anything less than enthralled when I knit her patterns. They always come together so nicely - it's very satisfying the way that everything just works! Working with the Malabrigo was very nice too, as I believe I've already said. It's beautifully soft, though I'm not sure that I'd want to use it for everything. Perhaps I'm a little old fashioned, but I kind of like my wool with a little more substance. Still, I'll definitely use it again!

In other crafty news, I broke out the fabric paint - something I'd been meaning to do for a very long time:


I love painting random designs on things - it's so therapeutic. I was very pleased with how this one came out too - don't worry, it's a lot less patchy now (the above shot was taken just after the first coat). It was the test run, since I hadn't used this brand of fabric paint before, and the directions for setting it were infuriatingly vague. But it's been washed since, and all seems to be well. Now it's all I can do to restrain myself from running out to buy more plain tops to paint. And I have plans for skirts as well. Because I don't have enough hobbies already, or anything...

I've also started a scarf (already halfway through thanks to all the lecture recordings I've sat through this week - my iPod is a lot more forgiving of me knitting through lectures than I imagine the actual lecturers would be if I tried doing it in class!), and a shawl. I have particularly high hopes for the shawl. It's a Laminaria, and I'm using some Wired for Fibre yarn in the most beautiful shade of dark green ever (in case you haven't noticed, I have a bit of a tragic addiction to green). I'm scared to death of it, because it's my first attempt at charted lace, but the thought of how beautiful it would be is enough to spur me on. But first, I need to knit something ridiculous for a friend's engagement party tomorrow. More on that at a later date...

Back to reality

I have officially been reminded of the reason why I'm always so tired during semester. Urrkkk. Of course, I can't really complain too much, because I doubt that the situation is really improved by staying up until 4:30am watching bad sci-fi with a friend when you need to get up again at 7am. Um, whoops... Ha, at least this shows how I'm still emphatically not one of the cool kids, even with the fashionable Monday morning sleep deprivation. Blake's 7 has not been cool since the 70s, and even then I suspect it wasn't as cool as my dad makes out...

I've been knitting away on my Liesl, but it's coming along slower than I had expected. This is mainly due to the general business of life and my younger brother corrupting me with computer games far more often than I'd like to admit, though can also be attributed to the fact that writing is currently trying to wrest it's title of "Anna's Procrastinatory Craft of Choice" back from knitting. I've written a colossal amount over the last few days. I'm nearly finished on the piece that I'm writing (I am hesitant to say book - it's not a book unless someone publishes it...), so now I've got some adrenalin going and it's hard to put down. Sigh. Poor neglected Liesl...


There's my dodgy work-in-progress snap to prove that I am still persevering. The body is done, and now all that's left are the sleeves. But I'm just having trouble biting the sleeve bullet for some reason. I think it's just a little bit of "I-can't-be-bothered-to-pick-up-stitches", because I'm generally quite happy with how it's coming along. Hopefully the laziness will pass - once it does I should finish fairly quickly.

I also did a little bit of dyeing on the weekend. On the rare occasions that I dye yarn, I tend to go mainly for blues and greens, so I decided to deliberately do something different for a change.


The goal was to try and dye yarn in fiery colours, and I'm quite happy with how it came out. The last time I tried for red, it came out orange, so this is a definite improvement on that front. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing to do with it (though with my nerdish/mythologically inclined leanings, attempting to knit a phoenix isn't out of the question...), but I'm glad that it worked out.


In other news, uni is making me lax on my recreational reading, and I really need to update my reading/writing blog. Perhaps I'll wait until I finish the piece I'm writing, and then do some kind of fist-pumping victory post...

I'm pleased to report that the resident critters are all doing well. Titus is still happy and full of beans in his tank. He's a greedy pig by betta standards - every morning I wake up and he's bobbing up and down in the front of the tank wanting to be fed. He's very cute though. And Alex, my dear senile old man cat, has discovered my bed. Because it's not the room I used to sleep in before I moved out, and because he's 19 and really not quick on the uptake any more, it's taken him a while to figure out the whereabouts of my bedroom. But a few days ago, he made a discovery...

Progress and plans

Yes, yes, I'm a lazy bum and haven't been blogging here as much. Life has been a bit crazy lately. And it's only going to get crazier - I go back to uni next week. I'm taking a full load of law subjects for a change, hopefully wrangling some volunteer legal work with the Student Union, probably taking a Japanese language class on the side, and working part-time. Um, what was I saying about crazy? I won't have time to breathe. But I'm sure I'll still find time to knit and procrastinate, and everything else will flow from there...

I'm doing some smaller projects at the moment. Okay fine, one of them is a cardigan, which I suppose doesn't really count as 'small', but it's lace on big needles and apparently doesn't take very long at all, so I am optimistic.


The lighter green item on the left is a hat I'm making from some very lovely Wired for Fibre yarn. It's my own design, so it may or may not actually work out. But in the meantime, the colour is absolutely beautiful - it's varigated, but without any of that nasty obvious pooling that sometimes makes me twitch a little.

The darker green is the aforementioned Liesl cardigan. I was curious about all of the fuss being made over Malabrigo yarn, and then when I found an Australian vendor who sold it, I decided to check it out. I can now see why people go on about it so much - it is lovely and soft, and the colours are beautiful. I don't think that I'd want to use it for everything, but it is very pretty. It was originally earmarked for a Sand Dollar Pullover (Ravelry link, because I couldn't find a decent picture elsewhere), but then after taking a long and hard look at this jumper, I realised that it was probably not likely to work very well with my body shape. As we know, I'm rather tall, and most of my height is in my torso. I don't want to end up with a midriff jumper - it's not a good look. So the yarn is going to be a Liesl instead. Hopefully it'll work out well (though I've already arsed the pattern up a little bit - oops).

(The orangey-gold yarn is a skein of Sundara that I have no idea what to do with. I love the colour, but I'm really not sure that it will suit me in a garment. It's in the photo because, well, it looks really nice with the other yarns, and it might as well earn its keep by posing for me until I figure out what to do with it!)


And there are other things that I'm in a perpetual state of working on. What can I say - I have somewhat of an impulse control problem when it comes to casting on for new things. The above is a kind of armwarmer-esque creature, born from a perverse whim to attempt some colourwork with the Dream in Colour yarn I had left from my Corona jumper. It's languishing at the moment because I can't be bothered to make the thumb hole (that requires, you know, thought and concentration). There's also those long-neglected colourwork socks I started late last year, and also a soon-to-be-felted bag. And who knows what else. Like I said, impulse control problems.

I also promised my Dad that I'd make a jumper for him too - he saw the moss stitch on my Terra jumper (see last entry) and liked the way that it looked in the yarn I was using, so now he wants a jumper. Laugh at me if you want, but this is quite exciting. Normally my family view the knitting as somewhat odd. I mean, I've made things for them, but unless we're actually in sub-zero temperatures (and living in Australia, that doesn't exactly happen often), they don't tend to get worn. On this note: Abby - you asked if I knitted much for others. The answer is no, not really, but it's more because of lack of demand for said knitting than any overt knitter's selfishness on my part. So a family member actually requesting a garment is unprecedented! I'm having fun fossicking through potential patterns...

Anyway, that's enough rambling. I have overdue items to return to the uni library - whoops...