King Cole Mirage child's blanket

This was my bus knitting for several months.  I bought the yarn, 4½ balls of King Cole Mirage, from a charity shop one day when I was badly in need of a yarn fix.  It is 50% wool 50% acrylic so by no means on my list of allowed yarns.  But it reminds me very much of Rowan's Tapestry, same structure, also slightly fuzzy but not at all as soft to the touch.  The acrylic means that it is machine washable so it is eminently suitable for a child's blanket, and that is all that the yarn would stretch to.  The balls were 100 gr.

I tried knitting a log cabin block, from the instructions in Mason-Dixon Knitting, but I was not happy with it.  It was not square.  I could have worked that out before I started, but it still took me by surprise.  Also, the picking up stitches would be too complicated for bus knitting, so I reverted to my usual diagonal blocks.  And I greatly enjoyed knitting the 36 blocks that the blanket took.

The stripe sequence in this yarn, unlike Tapestry, is regular, so there were no surprises.  I did consider knitting all blocks the same, but thought it was too risky, because one small discrepancy between blocks one and two would turn out to a large large one between 35 and 36.  I had fun arranging the blocks.  I tried forming diamonds but I thought it too sophisticated for a child, so I went for diagonal lines.  Now I see a large diamond instead.

I crocheted the blocks together, this time with slipstitch, and it works better than double crochet, but it still makes the blocks bumpy.  Blocking the blanket - laying a damp towel over it and leaving it to dry - did improve it.  I considered knitting an i-cord edging, but it seemed too much effort for this project so I crocheted a crabstitch border instead.  (And I enjoyed the crochet so much that now I'm crocheting on the bus, but I will write about that later.)
 

King Cole Mirage Child's Blanket

Yarn:  King Cole Mirage 50% wool 50% acrylic, 400 gr

Needles: 3.75 mm

Tension: 24 st and 28 rows per 10 cm

Size: 65 cm by 65 cm

Knitted: 1 October 2010 to 4 July 2011

Kaffe Fassett Autumn Leaves

It has taken me a long time to finish this tapestry cushion.  I finished stitching it nearly a year ago.  Since then I have tried to decide on a suitable fabric for the backing.  In the end I went for a piece in my store - bought as a remnant in John Lewis more than 20 years ago.  I like the backing to be similar in colour to the front of the cushion.

Then it was a question of cushion pad.  Being rectangular it is of course a non-standard size so it is not possible to buy one the right size.  I worked out the sizes of two I needed.  I usually use down pads, but the thought of opening them up and having down all over the room made me think again, so I used polyester filling.  I sewed a new cover from a pillow case, opened up the two new pads and stuffed the new one.  I don't think I put enough in the corners because they form points.  If I wanted to redo it I would have to undo the seam, so I won't.  I hope the stuffing will settle with use.  If the tapestry looks uneven and the backing creased it is because I washed bothe before sewing them together.  They have both been around for a long time.

I enjoyed stitching this very much.  In places the shades were very similar, so I was glad there was a chart I could refer to.  I think I like doing these because it means handling wool, because I like seeing the design take shape and because it is fairly mindless work.  You don't need to think while you do it.

Now I have the next cushion to do a backing for.  This is a standard size so I will be able to buy a pad.

I am practising not buying yarn

with little success.  My plan to limit my yarn purchases to 300 gr per month lasted for no more than a few weeks.  I have made a little advance.  I have a (mental) list of the kinds of yarn that I'm allowed to buy, and in the main I'm sticking to it.  Unfortunately the list tends to expand according to what I see.

There are two purchases that I wanted to show.

I have a theory that you can find anything that you set your heart on in a charity shop, sooner or later.  Some days, when I set out, I fantasize about what I would like to find today.  One item on my wish list for a long time has been a Kaffe Fassett kit, and I did find one.  Not quite right, not Kaffe Fassett, but it was a Rowan kit, an Annabel Fox.  It is for a sweater, called Persian Iris.  There were 800 gr of wool - a cream tweedy yarn, Kaffe Fassett mohair silk and DK wool.  The small balls all weighed 25 gr, so they had not been weighed according to the amount of yarn required in the pattern.  I don't have any intention of knitting this sweater, I don't think, so I will just take pleasure in owning it for some years, and then the yarn will end up in a blanket.  Probably.

The second purchase was 32 balls of Rowan Tapestry, one of the yarns that I just can't resist.  There were two shades, 175 and 177, but they are very similar, in shades of blue.  I have already knitted a sweater in this yarn, and I was very pleased with it.  There was a pattern for a cardigan in the same Rowan booklet that I liked, but for the time being it will remain in the yarn store with all the rest.  I like being able to play with ideas for it.

Random rows

It has been fun devising the colour bands for my Modern Throw, but after a while I found that I was repeating myself.  So I looked for a way to get a true random sequence.  I had decided on an even number of rows for each band, and it seems that 6 was the maximum, so I was looking for a sequence of 2, 4 and 6.  The easiest way would be to throw a dice where 1 and 2 = 2, 3 and 4 = 4 and 5 and 6 = 6.  But no dice was to hand, so I had to find another way.

The obvious solution would be to use the random function in Excel.  With a little bit of manipulation I could get it to produce the random sequence I wanted.  But to do that I would have to turn the computer on - not something I want to do in the middle of knitting.

Then I remembered my scientific calculator.  It has a random function that returns a three digit decimal number.  Perfect - easy to keep by my knitting and it gives an immediate result.  I pick out the 2, 4 and 6es, ignoring all other digits, and I keep on pressing the key until I have the number of numbers I want.  For one block the total should equal the number of rows in the block.  This is even more exciting knitting - not having control of what the block will look like.

I understand that there are websites that will produce random numbers, but why let somebody else do the fun bit?  I love maths, nearly as much as knitting.

Another blanket

I have finished blanket #140 including fastening the ends.  I liked working with it; the mohair made it feel very pleasant.  I still think there were two many disparate colours in it, but since I'm limited to the yarn in the yarn store there is little I can do about it.  I was disappointed to find that although it was knitted in aran weight yarns it only weighed some 150 gr more than a DK blanket.  The blanket was some 10 cm narrower than a standard blanket.  I didn't do a tension square - I calculated on the basis that aran is usually 4 stitches per 10 cm fewer than DK.  Obviously my tension is closer.

I decided to knit my next blanket, #141, to DK weight, because I enjoy it.  I will do others in aran, to experiment, to get rid of more yarn even if it is only 150 gr.  This blanket is pink blue violet, and I keep thinking it has not come out very well.  From a distance I like it better.  Close to I like the look of plain DK yarns.

 

















The first garment I unravelled was this shetland vest, complete with label saying Shetlands from Shetland.  It looks like a traditional fair isle pattern knitted in authentic shetland wool.  Very pleasant it is.  I had to think very hard before I decided to unravel this, because it seemed such a shame.  But then what else would I do with it?  I bought it, very cheaply, in order to unravel it.  I tried it on.  It was the right size but it felt stiff and unpleasant.  So now it is gone, and the wool is very nice.

The second garment is another of my Kaffe Fassett garments.  I decided to unravel them in order to knit a blanket solely of yarn from them.  This pattern is called Big Crosses and it appears in Kaffe's Classics, but in different yarns and colours.  It says there that the pattern also appeared in an early Rowan book, so perhaps this one came from there.  I thought it might have been a kit, but Kaffe does not say anything about a kit - he says it was not initially popular.

I thought it was knitted in a DK and 4 ply yarn combined throughout, but when I unravelled it I found only two DK yarns.  The rest were 2 strands of the same 4 ply combined.  Most were a very nice shetland with a few ordinary wool yarns.  It was very well knitted, good tension and it looks good.  It was enornous - no chance of me wearing it at all.  The ends were just knitted in, so it was easy to unravel.  I like the colours and the yarns are lovely, but I'm having second thoughts about doing a blanket just with them.  Using just short lengths would end up with too many ends.  So perhaps I will use them in the standard blankets.  I will hold off for now.

Geo Modern Throw C8

The yarn came first.  I found some chunky Icelandic yarn in a charity shop.  I knitted with similar yarn some years ago, and I think it is lovely, so I bought it.  Then I found more similar single ply chunky yarn to complement it.

I came across the pattern on the Knit Picks website last year.  The thing I like about it is the stripes, that you can vary the widths and it still looks good.  And that's why it is suitable for using up different kinds and colours of yarn.  There are two versions of the pattern, the Geo Modern Throw and the Retro Throw.  The main difference between the two is that the Geo Modern has two stitches between the decreases and the Retro one.  I liked the sculptural effect of two stitches, so mine is a Geo Modern Throw.  The pattern also uses chunky yarn - it gives  a choice of several - so the tension will be similar to mine.  (Knit Picks have changed the site since I printed off the patterns.  They are both called Retro Throws now.  My pattern is the purple green one.)

But tension doesn't matter.  You cast on stitches working in the round from the outside, decreasing until you run out of stitches - or get to about ten - when it should meet in the middle.  I went for large blocks of about 40 cm, and cast on the number of stitches I thought would achieve this.  The blocks curl up around the edges, so it is impossible to say if they will now.

The other yarns that I included are:

The Annabel Fox Chunky Donegal.  I found eight 100 gr hanks of this eight years ago, and I have finally found a use for it.  It is thicker, more solid than the chunky yarns you find now, and it is thicker than the other yarns used , so it is a shame that I included it.  I like the brown tweedy colour.  Annabel Fox designed for Rowan at the end of the eighties and she published at least one book of patterns and obviously went on to do her own brand of yarns.

Two Patons yarn: Husky and Moorland.  The shetland type Moorlandhas a note to say that it is distributed by Susan Bates in the USA, so at some stage it has made the journey back to the UK.  I think both yarns originate from the 1970s.







Some Icelandic yarn spun in Great Britain.  This is slightly thinner than the real Icelandic yarn.












I enjoy knitting this and it is so easy.  The only tricky part is making sure that the stitches aren't twisted when you join the cast on row.  The pattern does not specify how to cast on.  I didn't want to use my usual method, long tail cast on, because I would end up with a lot of ends from tails too long.  I tried cable cast on but mine was too tight.  In the end I went for the simple single cast on.  I will have to see what it looks like when the blocks are joined.

The first long rows are peaceful, and they soon get shorter.  I started with 80 cm circular needles, and I had 60 and 40 cm ones ready but I found I can get straight on to 20 cm double pointed needles.  When you get that far the rows take no time at all and the block is soon done.  It is nice to plan the colour bands.  I try to limit the bands to an even number of rows because it is easier that way to keep track of the decreases every other row.  Stitch markers are essential.  Mine come from the markers from electric toothbrush heads.  I saw an even better suggestion in Adelheid's blog - rings from discarded bras.  They have a nicer feel.  The beginning of the row is marked with a loop in a different yarn.

About this blog and blanket #140

It is many weeks since I last wrote.  First I bought a new computer - because the old one was old - and it took a while before I could get the new one to handle pictures the way I wanted.  At the same time I was unwell.  It need not have stopped me from sitting down to write a blog entry; it did not stop me from knitting, but I was annoyed at having my routine interrupted.  Then I went away for a brief holiday, and that did me a lot of good, but it took me away from my computer and the internet as well.  Now I'm back and I have decided to put mind over matter, ignore any pains and continue as I used to.  It doesn't help that I think it more important to keep up with other people's blogs than to write my own.

About my own blog - so often I wonder if I should stop writing, as it is so difficult to get down to it.  When I started I imagined I would get some followers, and I thought I had several when I wrote in Swedish.  Now it seems there are only one or two left, so is it worth it?  I do very little exciting knitting any more.  I feel stressed by the extent of my yarn store, and that I can't stop adding to it, so I have decided to knit what I like knitting, rather than knit to use up the yarn I should.  I want to continue to write this blog, for my own sake because it is useful to have an account of what I have knitted, and what I thought about it at the time.  It seems so laborious to update my Ravelry page.

I have had time to start and finish blanket #140.  I unravelled this tunic type sweater.  I bought it several years ago, and I wore it for a while, despite the garish burnt orange colour, because it fitted me so well.  Even the sleeves were the right length, ie shorter than normal.  The yarn is light, and it has the same silk smell as Rowan Summer Tweed, but it is much lighter, so I think it is Jaeger Trinity - a cotton silk nylon blend according to Ravelry.  I don't like using bright yarns like this in my blankets because they stand out too much, so I thought I would knit a different type of blanket using just three yarns.  But when I unpicked it I found that the yarn was thinner than DK, so I had to reconsider.  I decided to knit a thicker blanket instead, and adding a 4 ply to this and to other DK yarns, using size 4.5 mm needles.  Usually I go for size 4 mm and DK weight yarn, so using two 4 plys together.  It has occurred to me earlier that my blankets could be thicker, so it would be a useful experiment.

So that is what I did.  This is what it looks like.  At a distance it does not look very different from the other blankets.  It feels better.  I saw other advantages as well.  Thicker yarn and thicker needles would mean fewer stitches and therefore quicker knitting.  It would also take more yarn, so my yarn store would get depleted sooner (in theory).  The one disadvantage that I have found is that I prefer the look of two 4 plys together, ie equal weight yarns, rather than one thin and one thick.  Although it would help if I took more care to match colours.  I still like to use my method of using yarn randomly.  And there are always yarns that are difficult to incorporate in any colour scheme, and finally I get exasperated and add it even if I know that it will add a note of discord.

I will show three charity shop bought yarns used in this blanket.  The white mohair, in a 1oz ball so pre 1971, is made in Scotland, and is the usual blend 67% mohair, 28% wool and 5% nylon.  It is lovely and it gives such a nice feeling to the blanket that I must make an effort to add mohair to all my blankets.  The Wendy in a nice apricot shade is also in a 1oz ball but probably slightly later because it has 28.35gr in brackets.  The third one is unlabelled.  It is a thin boucle of three threads spun together, possibly two cotton with one nylon.  These are the kind of yarns I must not buy any more.

The other garment that I unpicked for this blanket is another Kaffe Fassett Persian Poppies pattern, this time a waistcoat, I think from a kit, because it seems to have all the right Rowan yarns.  There was quite a lot of cotton chenille and other cotton yarns in it.  It is loosely knitted and large.  I thought it would be easy unravelling, but I found that the side edges have been zigzagged by machine and the sides sewn together by the same machine zigzag stitch.  I found it difficult to see why.  The edges were quite neat and did not flare in the least so it seems unnecessary.  There was a lot of lovely yarn in there though.  It is knitted in fair isle, except for the centre of the flower.  It is done as intarsia so it produces short lengths of yarn, too short to be reused, and it annoys me.