Knitting Assessment

I have the January blues. Well, not so much blues as I am already tired of January. I am tired of the reinventions, the interventions, and the reiterations. Oh, the cries of Find yourself! Get on top of your stash! Tidy up your house! that I hear echoed all over the place. It is not that I don't want to sort out my life, tidy the stash, make my home lovely and all that - but January is only nine days old and I feel guilty/stressed already. Also, I do not believe in quick solutions and clever quips. I once moved my entire life across the North Sea and I used quick solutions and clever quips to sort out my belongings. I still miss things I let go because I had not touched them for six months at the time. I wonder what is behind our modern day reluctance to have a past - belongings that stretch back further than six months, things that hold memories, and items that carry a significance beyond daily use? I subscribe to the famous William Morris maxim - Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful - I just think we sometimes forget the beauty aspect of our lives.

I like beauty. I like thoughtfulness. I like slow living. I like knitting. And that, dear reader, is what I call a clumsy segue.

The Bute cardigan. I love working on this and I am taking my time too. It is a constant joy to knit this - seeing the colours transition, watching the peerie patterns emerge and working with Rowan Felted Tweed (my favourite yarn du jour) and Rowan Colourspun. It is a meditative knit too - the peerie patterns are 4 stitches/5 rows repeats and just as soon as you've started one, you are done and ready to uncover the next colour. Meditative, indeed.

I was never quite sure about the cool pink - Peony - that I chose a contrast colour but I think it blends in well. Would I change the colours? Maybe make the purple - Bilberry - more prominent? I think the colour combination works, actually. It is a radical departure from the original autumnal colourway. It will work beautiful with the greys and purples in my wardrobe. Just two sleeves and a buttonband to go..

I have decided to knit another Felted Tweed fair-isle top after I finish Bute. Fyne is a free pattern from Rowan and there are several gorgeous FOs on Ravelry. Krraver has knitted one using the same colour for the ribbing and the background (I like this idea), onehandknits used a dark background colour (I like this too!) and jediknit has styled it beautifully. I am undecided on the colours - we'll see what remnants I am left with once Bute is finished - but I am definitely leaning towards something green/brownish.

Speaking of browns and greens .. here is a sneak peek at two designs I am working on for the oft-mentioned, still-languishing-in-production Doggerland collection. Sorry about the violet tinge to the photo - that is what you get when you try to take photos on cloudy, foggy January day!

The (ahem) oatmeal yarn is Garthenor Shetland 1ply. It is gorgeous, earthy yarn with a soft handle. The stitch definition is a bit .. rustic .. so it is not a yarn that lends itself well to crisp lace patterns. I would love a whole jumper or cardigan in this yarn - something relatively straightforward which will let the yarn do the talking.

The green shawl had my knitting group giggling. "What? Another one?" they guffawed. Actually I don't really own a green shawl and this one is a sample, anyway. So there. The yarn is Snældan 1-ply in the Turf colourway (also known as "Karie's favourite lace yarn in her fave colour") and I am truly in my happy place when I'm working on this.

Snældan 1-ply comes with quite staggering yardage. When I design I have a rough idea of how many rows I can chart before I run out of yardage and I will work out pattern repeats based upon that (yes, designing is all about number crunching, folks). I thought I'd be about 66% into my yardage at this stage - I've not even hit the 50% mark. In other words, this is going to be a huge shawl. A huge green shawl. Hmm, I might have to nick it off myself.

Confession time. I have been reassessing some WIPs in my vicinity. I think I'll rip out the Acer cardigan. I loved knitting it, but I lost momentum at a crucial point. Some knits you just have to keep plugging away at .. and Acer was one of those for me. Both the pattern and the yarn will be revisited - but not now. I am also tempted to throw out some old FOs - the Dragonfly cardigan, my first February Lady Sweater, and the Sun Ray top. I never wear them, you know.

Good grief, January has gotten hold of me.

The Light Is Pale & Thin

Oh, 2013. You are off to a slow, slightly bemusing start. Life is slowly creeping back into Casa Bookish. The suitcases are nearly unpacked, the laundry basket is nearly empty, and the fridge has been emptied of all holiday food. I still feel exhausted and I get easily winded, but I am feeling much better than I did just a few days ago. We've caught up with several friends and everybody seems to have been laid low with something this past holiday season. One thing is certain: I'll be getting the flu jab next winter season! No need to go through this %&¤#! again if I can help it..

So, I've been crossing off items on my giant To Do list. One of the top items was "preparing patterns for release" - and I crossed that one off my list today. All three yarn club patterns are now available for general consumption via Ravelry - you can buy them individually for as a bargainous e-book collection. Seeing as the original yarns are not available, I've worked together with Old Maiden Aunt yarns to find good colour substitutions.

At the same time I am busy designing some new things - I currently have two new designs on the needles and three other designs somewhere in the process between sketch and knitting.

In-between all my sample knitting, I have been knitting on my Bute cardigan. I cast off the second front last night which means I only have two sleeves to go, huzzah! I'll be block the back and fronts this week and hopefully get the body seamed, so I can pick up stitches for the button-band. I have a couple of different button styles to decide between but we'll cross that hurdle when we get to it.

Resident Photographer ran off with the camera today or I'd show you the unblocked pieces.

And if a blog entry could have a colour, this entry would be pale blue-grey with a dash of pink blush. The colour of winter slowly turning on its heel. Just like this photo from the Botanic Gardens we took late last year.

A Knock on the Door

I don't think I've ever shared this photo before. I'm wearing all three At Midnight yarn club patterns at once .. I'm rather proud of how well the three pieces work together. I'm currently prepping the patterns for general release. Watch this space.

However, I am running way behind schedule at the moment. I had a medical emergency just before the holidays which disrupted every single plan I had made. Then all of Casa Bookish fell ill with winter flu as we were driving home from our Aberedeenshire family holiday. Horrible, horrible flu -  it took forever to clear and I think it'll be a couple of weeks before I am back to normal levels of well-being. Grrrr.

This means that I'm pushing the release dates of some new patterns as well as the oft-mentioned Doggerland collection. When you are a one-woman operation it doesn't take much for the house of cards to fall, alas.

However: there is a new Scottish knitting event happening this year - the Edinburgh Yarn festival. I'd strongly suggest you keep your eyes peeled for some big announcements being made soon. My lips are sealed!

Happy new year!

A Year in Books: 2012. Oh GOD.

2012 was the year my boyfriend read more than 120 books - not including re-reads. I read 80 books - a vast increase on 2011's 45 books, 2010's 21 and 2009's 38 . I wish I could say it also meant a huge increase in quality, but 2012 was a year of reading low-brow, easily-digested genre literature. My Kindle had something to do with this: it became far too easy to grab yet another regency romance when I found myself in need of distraction. And so I read books called things like The Wicked Wyckerly, Mad About the Duke, Surrender to a Wicked Spy and so forth. I remember very little about most of these books. So easy to read, so easy to forget. Writing about the best books I read in 2012 is easy. There weren't that many.

Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin was fantastic. I also really liked an anthology called Justified Sinner: An Archaeology of Scottish Counter-Culture which looked at radical arts & literature in Scotland from the 1960s onwards. It's a niche publication but definitely my sort of niche.

I did have a handful of decent reads - mostly regencies like Loretta Chase's Miss Wonderful which was a thoughtful, well-researched look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon rural Derbyshire post-Waterloo. It was also a look at what warfare does to the human psyche. It veered closer to traditional romance territory in the second half, but even so it remained psychologically convincing. Sherry Thomas' Ravishing the Heiress was beautifully cynical and almost uncomfortable to read.

But there were far too many forgettable, formulaic books in my reading year. The few times I read non-regencies, I didn't like the books much due to poor choices on my part.

I have a plan, though. And that plan is called "my bookshelves". I have so many books that I genuinely want to read:

From the bottom up:

• Andrew Drummond's Volapük - An Abridged History which appears to combine many of my favourite literary topics (Scottish literature, universal languages, Sir Thomas Urquhart and lunacy).
• Jasper Fforde's The Woman Who Died A Lot. The seventh book in the Thursday Next series. We met him in 2012 and I turned into a puddle of fangirl goo despite myself.
• AS Byatt's Ragnarok. One of my all-time favourite novelists reworking Norse mythology. Why haven't I read this already?
• Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. Her Oryx & Crake was one of my novels of the last decade. Why haven't I read the sequel yet? Why?
• Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie. I found this on the kitchen table, cornered the boyfriend and accused him of keeping an interesting sounding book away from me. Apparently I bought this for myself for my 2012 birthday..
• Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because I have read Charlotte and I have read Emily. And I'm a sucker for 19th century melodrama Brontë-style.

Finally, and not shown in the photo because I bought it for my Kindle, Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child. The novel has been making serious waves among book bloggers and publishers - and since I used to move in those circles (before knitting took over my life) I am rather curious.

Care to see how much I am sticking to my plan? Want to exchange some book love? Why not catch up with me on GoodReads? One thing is sure: the only way is up..

Seasonal Greetings

The days are finally getting longer. We may be heading into deep winter, but light is returning to the Northern hemisphere. This year I have been enormously homesick - yearning for a traditional Scandinavian jul with its baked goods, traditional singing, and blazing candles. While I have been too busy to do much baking myself (and singing is no fun on my own), I have kept candles going throughout the month. And now we turn the corner.

Glædelig jul - happy holidays - to you all. Here's a bit of 1950s Danish jule-kitsch.

2012: My Year in Knitting

I'll start by telling the truth: 2011 was a tough year for me. I ended it feeling I had lost track of who I was and where I was going. And so I began 2012 vowing I needed to spend more time doing things I love doing rather than doing things I thought I ought to be doing.

This is what I wrote at the end of 2011:

• I’m already working on more patterns. I have sketchbook filled with what is essentially 2-and-a-half collections worth of patterns. Hopefully I will be able to devote more time to this in 2012.

Tick.

• I’d really love to knit a few garments in 2012. Quality over quantity.

Not really, but I'll write more about that in a future blog post.

• And I still need more hats.

Moths did their best to destroy my hat collection so I did knit myself a handful of hats. I still need more. Cannot have too many hats.

• Keeping on top of the stash. I cannot promise ‘more yarn out than in’ but at least I won’t do the ‘oh, I fancy a ball of that’ thing because that way madness lies. I am getting far better at curating my stash already. May it continue.

I was much better at resisting temptation in 2012. I still added to the stash but I did so in a thoughtful way. I bought very little yarn (and only yarn I needed for specific projects) and I turned down offers & gifts of yarn.

• More conscious allocation of my knitting time: what is ‘work’ knitting and what is ‘me’ knitting?

Definitely.

2012 has been an interesting year. I did stick to my nebulous plan of "doing things I love doing" and it worked out pretty well.

I can roughly divide my 2012 knitting into two piles:  a bit of knitting for friends..

• One friend had a baby. I knitted Bagl a cardigan.
• Another friend got married. I helped knit her & her husband a blanket.

.. and a lot of knitting for work:

• I self-published Elsinore, Roskilde, Elvan, and Florence.
• My Windsor Hat  was published by Rowan.
• I collaborated with Old Maiden Aunt on a yarn club and published Serpentine Avenue, Baskerville, and Baker Street as a result.
• Kirkja was published by Knit Now magazine (and it made the cover!).
• I worked with Glasgow University on a series of workshops on handknitting & textiles in Scotland and gave a paper on working within the knitting industry.
• I gave an interview to Handmade Living.
• And I also addressed the re-emergence of handknitting on STV News.
• I worked briefly with Kaffe Fassett.
• And I met so many people this year! None mentioned, none forgotten. All incredibly creative people with interesting backgrounds and unique stories to tell.

I feel tired just looking at that. I also felt rather tired of my own voice at one point, but that's something for the 2013 list!

I feel like I didn't do much personal knitting in 2012.  I finished a shrug, frogged a couple of half-done garments and began knitting Acer and Bute. Both are still on the needles. But I cleared my head of all the oughts and that counts for a lot.

A couple of links to patterns and books I coveted this past year. A massive amount of good stuff seems to have come from the British Isles this year!

• The Bunty Mitts by Ella Austin
• By George! by Julia Duren
• Ella Jo by Allison Jane
• Diamonds Are Forever by Susan Crawford (from Coronation Knits)
• Radial by Cookie A
• The Underleaf Hat and Mitts by Kyoko Nakayoshi (from Cloudy Apples)
• Bute by Lisa Richardson (actually most of Rowan 52)
• The Puffin Sweater by Kate Davies (from Colours of Shetland)

And I loved listening to the following podcasts (among so many others):

• Electric Sheep by Hoxton Handmade
• A Playful Day by greentrianglegirl
• Stickpodden (in Swedish) by Elin & Karin.

Also a few fist bumps to the following yarn vendors/pushers:

• Old Maiden Aunt
• Rowan Yarns
• Ripples Crafts
• Yarn Pony
• The Island Wool Company

Phew! I think that was it. What a crazy, marvellous year.