On the Town

Oh, my Glasgow. She is pretty even if we do not see the sun all that often and it rains a great deal. She is pretty. We went into town today, to the Lighthouse (not as in Virginia Woolf, but as in The Lighthouse, the Scottish centre for architecture, design and urbanity).

Other Half wanted to see the Donna Wilson exhibition as he went to art school with her. We also fancied some free books.

In the end, we got away with eleven free books on a number of topics: food design, twentieth century architecture, re-imagining Scottish cities etc. Some very cool, interesting and useful stuff. I somehow also managed to buy a book on the Wiener Werkstätte because I'm a sucker for early twentieth-century design. Ahh..

Che Camille is not far from The Lighthouse. I like the place a lot and right now it feels like one of Glasgow's best-kept secrets. It won't stay that way. The boutique/design workshop takes up most of the upper floor of one of the many Victorian buildings lining the shopping street - and getting up there to see what they have done with the space would be enough of a reason, but they are also featuring fabulous, quirky clothes/furniture from young designers. I cannot afford anything (except tiny handknits which I obviously prefer to create myself), but I do surreptitiously feed off the fantastic sense of synergy created by its owner, Camille.

Tomorrow Other Half and I will be off to Che Camille's Clothes Swap/Customise Yr Clothes workshop. Should be fun.

(this is the staircase in the Lighthouse Tower. pretty, no?)

Thank you for your advice on what to do when the knitting mojo just isn't there. I have finished one sleeve of my grey jumper and will embark on the other tonight. I just think I hate knitting sleeves, to be honest. Then I'll be knitting the collar which is the bit which really interests me with this jumper.

I have two different types of collars in mind. One is an asymmetrical bow-like construct (vaguely reminiscent of half-a-fan neckwarmer (thank you, mooncalf, for the lovely example) for which I have no pattern plus I'll have to turn the construction around ninety degrees. I'm either going mad or am stretching my knitting abilities. Possibly both). The other idea revolves around a tube-like construct which I could attach with buttons. The latter is not half as elegant as the former but will not involve me trying to reverse engineer an unknown pattern and then turn it on its side.

Le sigh.

Next time I'm making a jumper, I'll use a pattern.

When In Doubt, Knit.

It snowed this afternoon and we are said to get heavy snowfall tomorrow. I have been curled up inside finishing my first project in 2009 and also doing a stash-busting exercise with plenty of colours. Colours warm my soul - especially with snow outside. The first finished project in 2009 is this little cardigan which I've dubbed Presto Chango Monsta (literally "Quick Change Monster"). I have a nephew due in March and I thought he might like to snuggle up in a soft little top.

The Presto Chango pattern was an utter delight whilst my chosen yarn, Washed Haze, was splitty and showed up every tiny flaw (plus I'll never be a fan of cotton or cotton-blends). I chose to embroider a little monster rather than knit a lacy front.

The end result is rather nice even if my freehand embroidery is wonky.

I suspect that Presto Chango will become my go-to pattern for baby gifts. It's very easy to customise and is a joy to knit. I just need to find a less irritating yarn (still washable and still soft).

My stash-busting project is this shawl. I began it whilst watching In Bruges and it has grown enormously since then. It's a bog-standard triangular shawl (I have posted brief pattern notes on the Ravelry project page) knitted in Wendy Fusion with an edging done in Rowan Kidsilk Haze. It makes me smile, it's easy TV knitting and it uses up all those stray balls of wool I have lying about.

A non-knitting observation, finally.

I do not have many kind words to say about Facebook and privacy settings. However, I just found out that you can actually block specific people from finding you on Facebook (let alone try to friend you or view photos posted of you). I have now blocked my old stalker* from viewing anything related to me which gives me a nice, fuzzy feeling. Thank you, Facebook. It's a nice feature.

(* stalker in the "oh god, now the police is involved, I have to hand over evidence and I cannot sleep in my own home" sense, alas.)

PS. Our Christmas tree has been recycled and its removal from our home now means I have free access to my yarn stash again, oh happy days.

Sighs and Cheers

It has been one of those nights. I was ready for a quiet night with my two knitting projects, sat down and I've had one minor mishap after another. My Norwegian Woods, which you can see to your left, started to go seriously wonky. If you follow the pattern link, look at the top part. See how the lace "branches off" to alternating sides? My lace didn't alternate sides and I didn't realise it until I had done a full 20-something repeat because I was very silly. No lifelines, of course, so I'll be tinkering/unknitting tomorrow (and possibly during the weekend too). Then I tried on my top-down sweater and stitches came undone and I'll have to play "catch them live stitches!" tomorrow as well.

One of those days..

..

.. except I just checked my email and was bowled over when I realised that T. (a good internet friend of mine) has bought a plane ticket from dark and gloomy Scandinavia, so she can help me celebrate my birthday next month! We've never met, so it's extra super-exciting and brilliant.

Knitterly Yours

Pattern: Woodland by Nikol Lohr. It's a fabulous pattern. One day I shall knit one for myself. I made it scarf-sized rather shawl-sized. Wool: 100purewool merino laceweight in "Choir". I used approx 65 g.

Needles: 3.25mm. I think I could have gone up to 3.5mm and it would have been amazingly airy, but I liked the 'airy, but substantial' fabric the 3.25mm needles made. Similarly, I think you could have taken it all the way down to 2.50mm as well.

This was my mother's Christmas present. I worked on it from May 2008 until September 2008. Then she sent me a wishlist saying that she'd like a scarf (yes!) but NOT in any shade of brown (cue panic!!). Although many kind souls offered to take the scarf off me, so I could buy my mother something, I decided to chance it. Fortunately, she loves it and I can stop panicking (for about another six months).

During Christmas I actually finished a beret, but I have been unable to snap any great photos of it (I blame my cold). I wanted a portable holiday project which would be fun to knit, easy to do in a house filled with relatives and something I'd use.

I chose a free beret pattern from the ever-reliable Garnstudio and it turned out to be the perfect holiday project. The lace pattern was interesting enough to keep me hanging in there but easy enough so my three-year-old nephew could bounce around without me losing track. Instead of using the suggested wool, I opted for Sandnes Tove in a lovely olive green shade. I used about 1.3 balls in total (which leaves enough for a pair of mitts).  I finished the beret in three days or so with nary a modification. Unfortunately the bouncy nephew and the Christmas excitement meant my gauge was way, way off, so the beret turned out to be huge. So I threw it in the washing machine at 40 degrees. It's now perfect. Perfect, I tell you.

What's on my needles now? A top-down jumper in a wool/alpaca blend. It's my own design and I'm now at that scary point where i have to work in darts. I'm also getting ready to cast on for a shawl, but all my laceweight is hiding in the storage room behind our Christmas tree. So I cannot access it, oh the trauma.

And so the knitting begins..

Hogmanay Etc

This is my favourite photo of 2008. I shot it in early August when we went to Sweden for a day. The weather was incredibly hot (although not particularly sunny) and all these tanned, long-limbed Swedish teenagers were hurling themselves into the Øresund from various cliffs and balconies. I don't know who this boy was, but I am very happy that I decided to take an impromptu photo of him.

I have frequently said that 2008 was an annus horribilis. Looking back, there were some good bits.

The Obama win.

Our trip to Denmark and Sweden was a great success.

I rediscovered my creative side and did so many strange, wonderful things that my head is slightly reeling.

I met some fantastic people: Ellie, Kathleen, Kippen, Anna (who has the best blog title evah), Paula, Angela, SoCherry, Lilith and Kirsty (and the rest do not have easily accessible online profiles) to name but a few.

My Alasdair Gray fangirl-ness reached a new height.

And I managed to remain alive with all my bits and pieces intact which is a bit of a triumph all things considered.

I don't really do New Year's resolutions because I know I will fail horribly if I set myself goals like "I need to lose ten kilos" or "I will watch Kieslowski's Dekalog without falling asleep." However, knitterly resolutions feel different.

I have signed up for a "Twelve Projects in Twelve Months" challenge and I would like to get back to doing stranded knitting (which I did when I was a teenager). I want to use more local wool instead of tricking myself into thinking that US brands are way superior. I want to knit down some of my laceweight stash. And I want to knit a Faroese-ish shawl with my Faroese laceweight to celebrate that I’m partly Faroese on an obscure side of my family.

And I'd quite like to read a bit more too and watch some of the DVDs that we have amassed recently (in particular Brief Encounter, In Bruges and Juno).

Happy new year to you all. As we say in Scotland - Happy Hogmanay! - and in Denmark - Godt nytår!

2008: A Year of Reading (Or Not)

I hate admitting this, but I did not read that many books in 2008. One memorable year I easily made it through 100 books. This year I think I struggled to read more than twenty-five books. I have my reasons for this sudden shift in reading habits - an irritating inability to concentrate (thanks to a certain health issue) and my new-found love of knitting which took up much of my spare time. Two books left their marks on me, though. Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic The Road was raw, bleak and.. superb. McCarthy's language usage was extraordinary: both his sentence structures and his word choices were deliberately pared down to the bare bones. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was exuberant, by comparison. Initially I found it difficult to get into Clarke's dry, if wordy, prose but after 200-odd pages I was thoroughly enjoying her tale of a Regency Britain which felt very recognisable and odd at the same time. A book which transcended its genre and its tools.

I saw even fewer films in 2008 than I read books(!) and the only film I would single out was released four years ago. Yes, really. However, Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was a very good film and I was sad that I missed seeing it on the big screen.

Let's just skip music except to say that Alaska in Winter's "Dance Party in the Balkans" with its lo-fi, organic/gypsy electronica was the soundtrack to my year. Oh, and song of my year? The Phoenix Foundation's Damn the River (from 2006!).

At least I've knitted a lot in 2008, eh?