Look - regularity!

Wow, look at me go on this whole posting thing! I've always found that things ebb and flow a little bit with hobbies - sometimes you're big into something, other times you let it go for weeks or even months. Perhaps this is sign that making stuff is moving back to the forefront of my brain, after it's little sojourn into (comparative) obscurity. Let's hope so.

I took a sickie from uni today - my back was acting up, and when this happens, it's usually a good idea to play it very, very safe. So instead of scraping myself out of bed stupidly early and going to my lecture, I scraped myself out of bed stupidly early (hey, I didn't know that my back was dodgy until I actually got up!) and spent the day studying, playing Age of Empires II and finishing the body of the garment I'm designing at the moment.




Please excuse the bright pink waste yarn holding the sleeve stitches.

I had to do a bit of soul searching about this one today. The body has come out exactly as I was hoping it would, which is rather good. Yes, the neckline is supposed to be low - that wasn't a mathematical lapse on my part. So all was well, but once confronted with the prospect of sleeves, I realised that I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. Originally the plan had been to do longer sleeves - probably around the 3/4 mark. The only thing keeping this up in the air had been whether or not I'd have enough yarn left. Well, I had yarn galore remaining after the body, but once I tried the body on, I realised that I actually kind of liked it sleeveless. So, I had a good squiz at it for a while, interrogated various Ravelry peoples, and then proceeded to 'ummm 'and 'ahhh' a great deal.

The story isn't finished yet, because the sleeves haven't been knitted. But I think that I've definitely decided to go short. With the variegation already makings its presence felt (Does it still reek of camouflage gear? Or am I going to be able to pull off 'woodsy'? I'm not sure yet...), I'm worried that with sleeves thrown into the mix, there might be just too much going on. Also, since we're hurtling headlong into spring, I'll likely get more immediate wear out of a short sleeved thing. So short sleeves it shall be. But what kind? Hmm...

And that is more than enough rambling about something that isn't even finished yet. Here, have a picture of something else:




I've been wanting to take a picture of these for ages. They're Russian chocolates given to me by a good friend - I'm not sure whether she got them when she was over there most recently, or if someone else in her family acquired them, but aren't they so cute! Look at the squirrel one! I almost don't want to eat them, because that would mean disturbing the wrappers (I say almost - why do you think that I took this picture..). My friend's mother told me that when she was young (in Russia), they used to save and collect the wrappers, then fold them into a shape like you see on the bottom right, making sure that the design showed on top. Then they would swap them and play games with them. I was far, far too enchanted by this story. I love hearing about childhood games that were different from mine.

Anyway, it's dinner time now, and I have a cooking adventure planned, so that's it for this installment. However, I shall like as not be tackling those sleeves this evening, so stay tuned for the next thrilling episode!

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...)

That familiar odd freedom

Well, as previously mentioned (to a tedious extent really), I have now finished exams for the semester, leaving much of my free time blissfully unencumbered by the demands of the law degree (needy little bastard that it is). So it really does make perfect sense that I'm now suffering from the same problem that always afflicts me when I make my biannual descent into the void between semesters. It's not boredom. One thing that I've always liked about myself is that I do not get bored, or at least not when I'm left to my own devices. I don't understand how anyone can ever be bored - there is a lot of stuff out there to do! Not boredom, no, but rather a kind of restlessness. There is so much I want to do that I subsequently find myself unable to focus on anything for long.

As usual, I've attempted to remedy this with endless 'to-do' lists (oh, how I love writing those things). But still, despite having more knitting time now, I have actually done very little by way of knitting. I got some work done on my pullover at pub night on Monday (beer and knitting actually mix rather nicely when it's just round after round of stocking stitch and nothing I actually have to devote conscious thought to), but other than that, it's been a whole lot of bugger all really.

I haven't been idle. I've been tending to my poor languishing social life. I made truly delicious lemon and almond cake. I tried my hand at natural dyeing with some eucalyptus and turmeric (pictures to follow). I made valiant, moderately successful attempts to get back into some of my current writing projects. But not much, yet, by way of knitting. With one exception:


I made this hat for the Bendigo Woollen Mills Ravelry Group 100g swap - it's the Sunflower Tam from Norah Gaughan's Knitting Nature (one of my favourites), made from Rustic 12ply in the "Green Tweed" colourway. I'd be wanting to make this pattern for ages, because it's pretty cute and construction is ingenious, but I can't really pull off tams or berets. But thankfully my recipient could, so away we went. Hope she liked it! This one was really fun to knit, and I may have to make another one, said inability to wear it be damned!

And this was what I received for the swap:


Look it! Look it! Tasty fudge, tasty soap, cute notebook and some awesome knitted stuff! All the way from Tassie (okay, it's not actually that far, but that's not the point). I'm totally spoiled rotten. The knits are from the Cairn pattern by Ysolda Teague, made from Bendigo Woollen Mills (of course) Luxury 8ply. I like them very, very much, and they fit perfectly. Here is proof (not to mention Anna doing that weird invisible-beard stroking thing that she always does when she's trying to model gloves)!


Other than this swap though, not much has been going on on the knitting front. Oh, except for me pretending that I'm famous on Ravelry, through the lovely article that the lovely Rebecca wrote, detailing our evil plot to take Tasmania by storm come August. We are concocting wicked plans, yes we are!

And that's all I've got! More posts soon, I swear. If you're lucky, I'll tell the tale of my eucalyptus dyeing exploits...

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...

More procrastination

Wow, it has been a very long time since I've finished knitting anything... Naughty Anna!

It's just that work and uni are conspiring to eat my head and suck my creativity dry... that's all.

Writing has been languishing as well. I was managing to write between ten and twenty thousand words a week before uni went back, and now I'm lucky if I manage five. The last week it's probably been less. Such is real life, I suppose.

I did indeed commence therapeutic socking however. I started making some Hedera socks with my Boxing Day Patonyle, and so far they're coming along quite well (I like the colour a lot):

I was a little nervous about the sizing. My feet are, well, perfectly in proportion to my 5'11 self, which is a nice way of saying that they're great big whacking man-sized feet (about an 11 to 11 1/2 in women's sizes, and wide to boot). Which I am attempting to knit pretty, lacey socks for (there's probably something flawed in this thinking). But I've been trying on as I go (somewhat obsessively, truth be told) and so far they're going on okay. Let's just hope that it keeps up. I saw someone on a forum say that they'd made them fit fine with no modifications, and they had bigger feet than me, so I'm trying to take solace in that. I guess that even if they turn out too large, I can always give them to someone else...

And now a few musings about Ravelry: I remember being embarrassingly gleeful the first time someone favourited one of the things that I had made (I think it was my silly multicoloured beanie, but it could have been the Cleo tank... I can't even remember). I recall the first time I got a favourite for something that wasn't even finished yet. Then I moved onto watching my various items compete for how many little hearts they could accrue - the results were quite surprising really (my Greenjeans was a clear leader for a while, but it's now been overtaken by my Leaf ties cardigan - which has now made it into double figures :D - which is odd since I thought the Greenjeans was far better in terms of yarn, fit and the quality of the knitting). And now I've had my first unfavourited item! This amuses me, which is good thing, because I suppose if it didn't I'd get pedantic and try and figure out why on earth I fell from this random person's favour!

The whole favouriting system is so nice; a really great feature. I think it works especially well for people like me who don't really interact in real life with many people who appreciate knitting/knitted items; gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling anyway. Even though I'm sometimes a little baffled at people's tastes... I'm surprised that as many people have favourited my stuff as have done, because really, I'm not a particularly good knitter technically speaking. And my ideas of colour can be... well... weird.

Anyway, that's enough knitting blather. Back to the sock for a bit, and then I'll go and play with my poor languishing imaginary friends (ie. Anna shall attempt to write). And then, if I'm feeling game, I'll bolster myself with another cup to tea and go into battle against the Corporations Law reading... Let's hope I make it back alive...

Haha, got it!

I'm on to you, digital camera! I was thinking it was doing a pretty bloody good job for what I paid for it (Anna = broke tight arse at the moment, so what I paid for it was not a lot), but now I've found it's weakness.


I've started knitting the Wavy scarf from Knitty in that shiny pretty rainbow merino yarn I was spamming pictures of a few posts ago. I wanted to make a scarf with it, but I needed one that was interesting to knit without any pattern being totally lost in the varigated colour. So far, this pattern has been living up to this requirement admirably... except when it is having its photo taken anyway.



Behold! In real life, the wavy pattern is showing through perfectly. But after about fifteen attempts, I've been totally unable to take a photo that demonstrates this. In photos, it looks like someone ate a ball of rainbow yarn and then vomited it up in a scarf shape. Maybe it's flash issues, I don't know. Point is, photographic evidence aside, I am happy with how it's coming along.

It's not scarf weather yet of course, in fact it's about the opposite. Though that said, Melbourne summer is treating us remarkable gently so far this year: the last two weeks the temperature hasn't strayed too far north of 30 degrees, and most days it's actually been cooler than that. Then again, as Chris points out (pessimist!), February is always the month that's bastardly hot, so I guess we're not out of the woods yet. Anyway (tangent alert!), back to scarf; I'm looking forward to having something colourful to crank out when it does start getting cold.


I still love my Greenjeans, though it's still languishing with a badly sewn button for I am lazy and easily distracted. It's not like I'll be able to wear it for months anyway. I am so feeling the internet love on this one too; someone had favourited (is that a word?) it on Ravelry about ten minutes after I'd put it up, and now five people have, and several of them wrote really nice comments as well! It is truly, truly embarrassing how excited this makes me. I suppose it's because, as I've lamented before, in real life I don't really interact very often with people who knit, so nobody really says, "hey, you made that? How awesome!". So, I'm very grateful that there's an internetty way to let me interact with people in this way.


The only downside of all this is that yesterday morning I was far too excited about my cardigan to be able to write much of anything; I scraped out a few thousand words eventually, but because I was a little, shall we say, hyperactive, my idiotic sense of humour kind of leaked out into passages that weren't really supposed to be funny. Idiocy clean up, aisle four! Still, I've beavered my way up to 38k this morning, so that's a good thing. Time to get back to it, too...

First real post... hurrah!

Wow. It is very, very, windy outside right now. No rain yet, though I suspect it'll come soon enough...

Anyway, knitting stuff:

Nearly, nearly finished my jaunty red Cropped Cardigan with Leaf Ties (http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring07/PATTleaf.html). Just have to sew the seams and finish doing the i-cord around the neckline (nearly done with the latter). I debated a little with myself about how slavishly to follow the directions, and then decided to go with the cooking approach. The first time that I cook a recipe, I follow it absolutely to the letter. It's only the times that follow that I modify it, warp it, defile it and do all those other things. So, the instructions for this pattern were adhered to quite devotedly. Figured it was best since there were a few firsts for me in this one. I did take a photo of this one (for Ravelry type purposes), but it turned out suckfully because photography is not one of my strong points ("what is this flash you speak of???..."), so I won't bother with it here.

Also, I'm slogging away at my ugly cabled jumper. I love it already, even though it isn't finished yet. I just want to start applying the euphemisms that people always apply to ugly things (ie. it's a jumper that has a lot of character, etc). I was turbo-proud of how the cable turned out. I couldn't stop showing it to poor Chris, even though it's complete and utter brilliance was totally lost on him. Behold, cable of festy-coloured beauty:

Well, that's the first time I've ever posted a photo on a blog. So if you can see the shiny (figuratively speaking) cable, do a little dance of victory for me. I know it's not a big deal, but my technological incompetance really doesn't stop at cameras. In fact, it pretty much extends to anything that either requires batteries or needs to be plugged into the wall. Except for my glue-gun. I can work that.

Sigh. I should probably be either reading cases or fiddling with wedding invitations...