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...

Hats and Fish

Well, uni went back yesterday, so I am now officially Busy again. I picked up my Restitution handbook only to find that I'd been assigned four chapters of the textbook as reading for the Wednesday class. Erm, yay for starting off slowly. And this is for just one subject! It's going to be a long semester. Not surprising though - I'm doing mostly electives, which inevitably means a gargantuan amount of reading (it's the trade-off for fewer contact hours and more specialised subjects).

On the upside, I have yarn and a hat! The yarn, retrieved from the post office this morning, was from The Loopy Ewe (again! I think I have a problem...), and here's the hat:



Ha - the downside of hat shots is that you can't crop out your face like you can when you're taking photos of jumpers, scarves, etc. It might be a shot of the hat, but it is also undeniably a picture of yourself. A mug shot. Not for the faint hearted when you're a little sleep deprived, a lot overheated, not really one for makeup at the best of times, and you know the thing is going on the internet... Oh well...

I designed the hat myself, mainly because I wanted to use this yarn (it's from Wired for Fibre, in the 'Tidal' colourway, and believe me when I say that it was far, far too beautiful to leave languishing in my stash), and I'd found some buttons that went with it rather nicely. I'm mostly happy with it - the problem is the one that comes up whenever I design my own hats, being that I mess up the crown decreases. I am improving - this one came out much better than the last, because at least the decreases are even. But I started too late, and then did them too close together to compensate. Oh well, I'm learning, and that really is the main thing. Unfortunately, I've always been better at learning from my own mistakes than by those of others. At least the yarn and buttons are cute enough to distract me from my inadequacies:


I'm not done with this idea though - the buttons-and-varigated-yarn-hat-thing, I mean. I'm going to take another few bashes until I get it right... I can be very stubborn sometimes...

Also, as promised by the post title, I have a fish! Working at a pet store was beginning to be a bit of a problem for me, because I kept getting distracted by the aquariums. I'd be trying to go and make the most of my meagre lunch break, and then find myself snagged in front of the fish tanks, staring with a glazed expression. Eventually the fishy temptation became too much...


Now, I basically fail at taking photos of fish - or at least I do at the moment - but here is the critter in question. He's a betta (aka Siamese fighting fish - to go with my ancient Siamese cat!) and his name is Titus! The above photo, for all that it isn't very good, actually shows his colour quite nicely - he's a lovely shade of cool blue with red on his fins. He's got his own little tank, all to himself (spoiled brat), and he seems quite happy in there so far. He's spent plenty of time exploring, and he's eating very well for a betta. I am quite enamoured with him, if you can't tell...

And now it's time to go to uni and plough relentlessly through textbooks. And staunchly ignore the new yarn - I'm not allowed to so much as ball it up until I've finished my Liesl cardigan...

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...

Proof that I'm still here!

Wow - that was a comparatively long break! I have been doing things, I swear. It's just that things have been taking a bit longer than usual. There have been a few social woes (who doesn't love an ex-husband spamming their phone 14 times a day? And at 2am no less, but this isn't the time and place to complain about that), and I'm working nearly full-time at my job at the moment, and that has meant cutting back on knitting/blogging time. And I wasn't always in the mood either. While I wasn't directly affected by the bush-fires that have been doing their best to demolish my state over the last week, I know people who lost homes, friends, and family members, and it's hard to sit still and knit when you're worrying/reading the headlines in disbelief...

But, all that said, I have been knitting away. Behold, I have two finished objects to prove it!




Number One: Terra by Jacquelyn Landry, in Bendigo Woollen Mills Rustic 12ply (Green Tweed), knitted on 6mm needles.

There aren't really any halfway decent photos of this one, due to a number of factors (specially a 5am bedtime, followed by a 9am call summoning me unexpectedly into work, followed by a work day that lasted until 9pm). So you'll have to live with this one! At least you get a taste of why my blog is titled as it is - and that's only half of one wall!

This was a fantastically quick jumper, and I was happy with how it turned out. If I did it over again I'd probably make the body just a little less baggy, and the sleeves quite a bit less baggy, but that's not to say that I'm unhappy with how it turned out. It'll be fantastic for when winter rolls around. I love the colour - it's somewhere in between dark green and teal, and the yarn was lovely and quite inexpensive. The pattern was good too - there were a few ambiguities around the hood/shoulder grafting, but applying common sense I managed to puzzle my way through and I'm sure that most others could too. I love the moss stitch and the large, pointy hood.



I'm almost tempted to make another one of these, actually.
(my, my Blogger - why are you being so cranky tonight when I try to post pictures!?!)



Number Two: The Cream of Spinach Scarf (Ravelry link here), in Noro Silk Garden (Colour 244), knitted on 5.5mm needles.

Not that much to say about this one really. I love it of course, but things knitted in Noro tend to look good because they're knitted in Noro, not because of anything that you did! That said, the pattern was great - it's a two row repeat, and one of those rows is just purling, so I didn't need to concentrate on it at all (indeed, I managed to watch a great many episodes of Skins while knitting it), but it looks lovely when blocked out. I think a version in a plain yarn would look beautiful too.

This yarn had been kicking around my room for ages. I bought it because I simply couldn't walk past the colours, but I wasn't really sure what to do with it, because I idealised it so much that no project seemed good enough. Then I had a reality check and decided to make a scarf, since at least that way I'd get to actually see the colours, and it's something that I'll get plenty of wear out of.

I was a little worried about the length - I hate stingily short scarves and I only had three balls of yarn. But I knitted at a fairly loose gauge, so this came out plenty long enough. I didn't measure it (my sewing tape measure wasn't even long enough), but if I hold one end in my upstretched arm, the other end still pools on the floor, and I'm not too far shy of six feet tall. So not a stingy scarf at all ;)

And now it's back to project limbo. I hate limbo. I'm currently swatching for some potential projects I have in mind, but I think I really need to raid my Ravelry queue as well. What a horrible problem to have...

Raspberries, Cupcakes and Terra

I really would have preferred it if I were able to title this post "Cupcakes and Terror", but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. Oh well, perhaps next time...

So, I started something new to cure this neither here nor there feeling I've been having on the constructive front the last few days. I'm making Terra from some lovely Bendigo Woollen Mills 12ply wool (highly appropriate for the middle of summer, I'm quite sure).

And also reading a lot - sticking to the whole 52 Books challenge thing (for all those playing along at home, reviews/results from January are here). And as for the third item in the photo... Well, you might not realise it, but this week is a somewhat of a special occasion. Every year in late January/early February, there comes a week when I can buy raspberries from the market for less than $3 a punnet (tight-arse Anna says "Yay!"). And this special week gets celebrated by gratuitous raspberry ingestion. How gratuitous you ask?

Answer: gratuitous enough to involve cupcakes (why yes, I am one of those irritating smug people who bake a lot and feel the need to tell people about it)!

Mmm.... passionfruit and raspberry iced cupcakes... In the sun, with tea and book...

Hate my guts - you know you want to...

A hot and restless entry...

Man, but it is hot here... Not just warm, but roastingly, sweat-drippingly, skin searingly hot. 36 degrees on Tuesday. 43 degrees yesterday (that's 109.4 F for all of you northern hemisphere types playing at home). And it's apparently getting to 43 today, and staying nearly that hot for the rest of the week... This is why I'm not a fan of Melbourne summers. It was so hot yesterday that the tracks on one of the train lines buckled in the heat (that's probably more a reflection on the disgrace that is our public transport system than it is evidence of the heat, but it really isn't a good idea to get me started on Melbourne's trains... grrrr).

Anyway, I haven't been knitting much the last few days. This is partially because of the heat, but I've knitted in hotter (yes, really). In all honesty, it's more to do with the fact that nothing is really exciting me at the moment. I go through phases like this all of the time, so it doesn't bother me too much, but I wish it would hurry up and pass. The main problem is that nearly everything that I have going at the moment is a self-designed project. I find that it's generally harder to get on with those, since pressing forward means that you actually have to think (as opposed to just losing yourself in hours of relaxingly repetitive knitting) and do calculations and try things on constantly.

The last point especially is a killer in this weather. Example: I'm currently making a pair of elbow length armwarmers that fit quite tightly at the moment because they have colourwork and haven't been blocked out yet. I've nearly finished one - there's probably maybe 15 minutes worth of knitting left on it. But I'm snagged because in 43 degree heat, I just don't feel like wrestling something woollen and tight-fitting onto my poor overheated self. If it was loose, maybe, but I don't want to have to wrestle with wool today. Just no.

I'm also in between projects when it comes to other people's patterns. There are two that I even have the yarn for, but my swatches (yes, I'm bothering to swatch for a change) are a bit off, and even though I own the more appropriately sized needles, they have current works-in-progress on them... All self-designed experiments - see above... Sigh. I know it probably won't be too long before I get my mojo back, but I hate knitting limbo.

One good thing though: I cleaned my room up. I'm aware that this makes me sound like a seven year old, but well, I'm a slob. Or more to the point, I am a person who has over the last six months had to figure out a way to cram a two bedroom unit's worth of crap into a small bedroom with no cupboard/wardrobe. Fun.

Mmm... yarn (excuse the dippy photo - the light is odd in my room). That's only part of it actually - there are some more boring plain yarns in bags too. These are the fun/pretty yarns. Combine all of the above yarn, plus more, with a book collection the size of mine and you can probably understand why I have storage issues. Still, I got there: the yarn is now organised, and my floor is now visible. Very good things.

Also, I like the way that my jumpers look in their drawer. It makes me happy...

At least the last week has been very productive from a writing standpoint - I've gotten a lot done, and rebuilt the momentum that I'd lost over the months before I went away. On that note, I'm off to go and play with words now. I'll try not to roast in the process.