Day Two: Pictured

I am still amazed that I live in the same city as this mad, bad building known as the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum. When you travel along Dumbarton Road/Argyle Street, all you see are dull shop fronts and dwellings. Suddenly the shops and houses give way to the Kelvingrove Park with Kelvingrove itself situated right on the edge. It was built in 1888 for a Great Exhibition and the building feels like a manic Victoriana Gothic fever dream with tiny turrets, arched windows, statues and staircases. Inside it is far more calm than you would suspect. I have been there so often it feels like my second home - if I were the heroine in a steampunk novel, that is. Right after I took this photo, a hailstorm broke. People tried to take shelter at bus stops or under umbrellas. Glasgow weather is one of the greatest challenges I know as a knitter and photographer. Try taking shots of a Finished Object or for a pattern when you don't know what the weather is going to be like ten minutes from now. No wonder that so many of my photos are taken indoors..

Then I went pub-knitting with a bunch of friends. I was trying to capture the spirit of a get-together: the banter, the chat, the riot of colour, the yarn mountains, and knitterly frustrations. I gave up. Instead I simply shot a series of people knitting. I never get tired of watching people knit (is this weird?) and how their hands work in small, precise motions.

The last photo is of me (wearing Signest's amazing "I YARN CPH" tee) and apparently I knit too fast for the camera shutter.. Apparently.

Knitting to me is also about community, feeling part of something a bit bigger than yourself and nurturing creativity across boundaries. It is about going to the pub with your best buddies and turning a heel over a glass of Whatever. It is about making knitting a part of your everyday life.

You can find more blogs participating in the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week by googling 3KCBWDAY2. If you have come here as part of the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, thank you for visiting. I'll still be here once this week is over and I'm usually blogging about arts, books, films, language besides all the craft stuff. Do stick around.

Day One: Green

Some people claim I have a bit of a problem..

..I have no idea what they mean.

In reality, though, I have to be careful that I don't end up wearing green head-to-toe. As a result of my love for green, I have recently begun thinking more about knitting neutral-coloured items (I already get a huge amount of wear out of my grey Nev shawl, for instance) and avoid greens except for accents.

Which is obviously why I'm knitting a mustard yellow cardigan.

You can find more blogs participating in the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week by googling 3KCBWDAY1. If you have come here as part of the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, thank you for visiting. I'll still be here once this week is over and I'm usually blogging about arts, books, films, language besides all the craft stuff. Do stick around.

Acing

What is your relationship with your Ravelry queue? Odd question perhaps, but I have been thinking about it for a few days. After bravely battling manflu my cold and after finishing a new shawl pattern (more on which later), I was itching to knit something. The obvious thing to knit would be Frontier (the pattern is a lot of fun) but I lost one of my needles somewhere in Casa Bookish. The tidying mojo is absent at the moment and so I turned to my Ravelry queue.

I have 30 patterns queued at the moment. I know most knitters struggle to keep their queue under control - I struggle to add to my queue because I think so very, very carefully about what I add to it. In my head, the Rav queue is the creme de la creme of what I want to knit. Many of the queued patterns have been there for years and I know exactly what yarn I am going to use and in which colour. I don't often cast on from my queue but when I do, it feels like the height of knitterly luxury and indulgence.

I cast on Acer by Amy Christoffers this week. I can see it has been in my queue since January 2011 though I am positive I had been wanting to knit since I first saw the pattern. So far I am just beyond the first few rows of ribbing and the first few rows of the chart. It is a fairly intuitive pattern - and very well-thought out. Loving how the ribbing melts into the cable/lace pattern.

I bought ten hanks of Rowan Silky Tweed (a heavy worsted/light aranweight wool and silk blend) in a December 2010 winter sale with Acer in mind. So far the pattern and the yarn match each other as well as I had imagined. Heavenly.

The colour is Mardigras - a light mustard yellow with orange flecks. I am going a bit more 1970s with my colour choices these days and that colour will work beautifully with tweeds and brown cords.

What will replace Acer's place in my queue? There are plenty of patterns I adore which I haven't queued: Sarah Hatton's Stevie (Paula's version is gorgeous - I have seen it in real life), Heidi Kirrmaier's Harvest Moon, Kate Davies' Deco, Amy Christoffer's Windsor cardigan, this charming Drops pattern and Lene Holme Samsøe's Lily - to name but a few. Will they join the queue? Who knows..

..I do think I overthink my queue way too much. Thing is, I am rarely disappointed when I finally knit something from my queue. It just feels right.

I have a pattern currently being test-knitted. Social media is the best: I idly mentioned on Twitter needing to have my next pattern test-knitted and within ninety seconds I had more than enough offers to have several patterns test-knitted. My mind, she was blown away.

I sat knitting in the backyard today and I had my new shawl draped around my shoulders to keep the spring breeze at bay. Total love.

Both Sides of the Internet

I have a long list of things I tell myself I Should Really Blog About and somehow I end up keeping them in my head. It has been puzzling me why this is so, but I think it is the combination of no longer being relatively anonymous and being able to talk to my Other Half about these things that I end up keeping things off the blog. It is a shame and so here we go.

Recently I was having a quick little internet chat about STFU, Parents. It is a website in the vein of Regretsy and Lamebook with a dash of Ravelry Rubberneckers and F_W (all these links should be considered NSFW) as it navigates social media sites and documents some truly unfortunate oversharing and jerky behaviour. I had an exchange with a friend who thought the site was rather mean. I agree that it is mean but also that it documents meanness towards other people. Let me expand upon that.

It never ceases to amaze me that my gender plus age plus relationship status = it is perfectly okay for people to ask very personal questions about the state of my uterus. What I take from STFUP is that I am not the only one who gets random "lol, so r u preggers? lol why not?" comments at me (or get emailed some insensitive 'lol' questions). I find some of those remarks and mails really, really mean too.

Of course, STFUP documents meanness towards other people too - particularly towards people's own children. That hilarious poop story will be infinitely less funny when your child finds it online 15 years from now - and it is really not funny now.

If a site like STFUP can make one person less likely to mommy-jack, ask me questions about my uterus and/or sexual orientation, post an embarrassing story about their kiddo, or name their child something horrid - then I am all for it. Even if that makes me a mean person. Incidentally there are also other variants upon the same theme and I think the common message is (as always): don't be a jerk.

Now that is out of my system, let me share an altogether lovely story about the kindness of strangers.

Remember the story about the lost shawl I found in Glasgow City Centre? It has been reunited with its rightful owner. In a completely unnecessary gesture, the owner has given me a gift - this made me tear up as I certainly did not expect anything.

Thank you Jules and Jules' Mum. You are amazing and much too kind.

Short & Sweet

A short and sweet story: This morning I found a handknitted shawl in Glasgow City Centre. I worried because if I had lost a shawl, I would be absolutely heartbroken.

I picked up the shawl and sent out a tweet: Did you lose your knitted shawl in Glasgow city centre this morning? Nip into John Lewis Glasgow haberdashery dept & describe it!

A lot of lovely people retweeted me, but I still fretted. I posted on Ravelry too and though I got some lovely notes, I did not get any leads.

So, after work was done, I sat down to look through the Ravelry project database. The yarn was easy to identify: 218 pages of projects!? Ughr! I decided that it would be quicker to look through the Ravelry pattern database and thankfully the shawl pattern was fairly distinct with just 52 projects to its name. Using the combination of yarn and pattern I found the project - and the knitter.

The knitter is in Germany which threw me. However, I twigged it was a knitter with Scottish connections and I sent her a tentative Rav message: I know this is a long shot but..

And you know what? It was the right knitter! And the knitter's mum will be reunited with her handknitted shawl! Isn't the internet (and especially Ravelry) a wonderful, wonderful place?

Coffee & Bagl

Spring arrived and so did a little baby. A good internet friend had a baby boy and in the grand tradition of knitters everywhere, I made a little something for the baby. I knew these things before I started knitting: 1) the little family lives near the sea, so I wanted a nautical flavour to the project; 2) it was going to be a boy; 3) plenty of people would be knitting for the baby, so I would be wise to knit something slightly bigger than a new-born size; 4) the mother expressed a love for modern Scandinavian-style childrenswear; and 5) the mother is a knitter so she'd appreciate whatever I made.

With all these things in mind, I narrowed down my pattern choices quite quickly. The Latte Baby Sweater was a big contender but I had problems sourcing a 4-ply yarn with a suitable colour range here in the UK. Denme was released just as I was pottering around on Ravelry, but the style was very much geared towards newborns as was the sizing, although the sizing issue would not have stopped me. Beach Baby ticked so many of my boxes but I was unsure about how much knitting time I would have on my hands and how much I would have the alter the yoke shaping (the notes on Ravelry were very helpful).

So I ended up choose Elizabeth Smith's Little Coffee Bean Cardigan and I am so very glad that I did. It was a very easy knit - it is a top-down raglan cardigan which is as easy as it gets - but it was made even easier by how much attention the designer had lavished on the tiny details that are easy to overlook.

An example: when you move from ribbing into stocking stitch, you have a row of fabric that is ever so slightly distorted. Elizabeth Smith knows this and works around this in her pattern, so your stripe sequence is not distorted. It is a tiny detail - just one row - but I really appreciate the designer caring about this one row. If she cares this much about a free pattern, I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with her commercial patterns.

Back to the Coffee & Bagl cardigan. So, I chose my pattern and as it was written for worsted-weight yarn, I quickly decided to use Cascade 220 which is available in a gazillion colours from Get Knitted (among other places). It is a good workhorse yarn and for baby items that is exactly what I want.

Going back to the nautical theme, I decided against the obvious navy/white colour scheme and plunged for a softer, more vintage-looking combination of beige and muted teal-blue. I really like the combination - it is subtle and looks classy.

As for the buttons, I opted for some coconut buttons I once scored in a really good eBay deal. I have used them before and I still have a few left. I really do like how they pick up the brown tone of the beige yarn.

As you can tell, I really liked this project and I was very happy with the end result. It came out exactly how I pictured it. How often can you can that? I took my time getting the finishing just right so all-in-all I probably spent about a week's knitting time on this little nugget - and finished it just in time for another little nugget to enter the world.

Welcome to the world, Baby Bagl.