Sock yarn

My friend Sarah has asked me to teach her to knit. I was happy to lend her needles and let her have the run of my stash of acrylic, but she wanted to get things of her own, which I can totally understand. I remember first going into a yarn shop when I was a new knitter, and being all excited. I brought three skeins, one of which I played around with and finished, the other of which was such horrid scratchy acrylic that even I haven't been able to find a use for it, and the third of which is strange boucle stuff which I have no idea why I ever picked up - still as yet untouched and living at the bottom of my stash.

So we went to a yarn shop, the Sew Inn, which was fun. I wasn't supposed to buy anything as I already have a 50 litre box full of yarn and am a poor student with many more sensible things to spend money on, but this shop just sold so many things I wanted.

I spent a long time cooing over how soft the cashmere and alpaca stuff was, but eventually settled on some sock yarn, because it seems to be exceptionally difficult to find in this country, and I would really like to knit a proper pair of socks, rather the huge ones you get from knitting with DK.



It will be interesting to see how they work up as socks. I am never sure how variagated yarns will turn out, but I think it should be a fun project - although I am officially promising myself that I will knit my second happy coloured slipper sock (see this post) before embarking on these socks, however tempting.

Fish blanket

I have been working on this project for about half the time I've been knitting, and it's finally near completion.

The fish blanket is like a granny-square blanket, but with tesalating fish instead of squares.



I did not go about this project in a sensible way. I found the pattern here and immediately thought it was a cute idea and thought I'd try knitting a fish to see how they came out, and did so on the first pair of needles that came to hand. After one fish I thought I'd knit another to see how well they actually tessellated. I think I knit four or five before deciding they were really cool and this was a project I really wanted to do. But by then I had four or five fish already knit on 5.5mm needles which I didn't want to waste, so continued doing this, without stopping to think that the end result was more open than I would like for a blanket.

I also had no grand plan. I had an idea it would be like a colour wheel, with the colours slowly blending into each other, but no real idea which colours were going to go where and what would blend into what, or how many fish wide or long it was going to be. It was fun laying all the pieces out and working out where they should go, but it wasn't the sensible way.

Googling the pattern suggests that a lot of people knitted this a few years ago (check out here, here and here, which I think is my favourite) and it was a great stash-busting exercise. For me it was the opposite. I started using my odds and ends, but as a relatively new knitter I quickly needed and wanted more. I had far too much fun on ebay buying lots of what were essentially other people's scraps, a huge amount of which I still have left.

As a result, most of the blanket is good old cheapy 100% acrylic, but there are odd bits of different stuff - there are a few cotton fish (which ended up a visibly different shape from the acrylic, and had to be yanked a bit to tessellate), at least one mohair (I knitted another but decided that I hate mohair a lot), a few that I think are blends but cannot be sure, and at least one that I'm sure was made of string.

The whole thing is 12 fish by 16 fish, meaning it will be finished when I have reached 196 fish. I haven't measured it properly, but it's roughly the size of my double bed, which makes it an absolute nightmare to photograph. It's size has meant the project went on the back burner for a bit because there is just nowhere in my student house where it can easily be laid out and sewn together.



This shows the missing fish, and the ones that have been knit but haven't yet been sewn in. I have 10 to go. 10!

I've been working on it since July, and I still can't imagine it actually being finished, and yet I'm nearly there.

My so-called scarf, happy coloured socks

I used to be good at project monogamy. I knitted scarves and hats that took relatively little time and waited until I had finished one project before I thought about the next. With the acquiring of new skills, more knitting needles and a greater sense of adventure though, I started on multiple things at the same time. It started off being just a swatch whilst I was mid another project. My problem is that swatches quickly become scarves.

I have one such project on the needles at the moment. It was supposed to just be a swatch. I chose the yarn because it was a colour I didn't particularly like or visualise using in a future project. But as the swatch grew, I decided I really liked the stitch, and decided to just keep on knitting until it was scarf-length. Now I have half an acrylic brioche-stitch salmon scarf and I'm still not convinced by the colour. I was going to post a picture of it, but my camera refused to take a clear picture of it.

Instead we have pictures of other works in progress. NB. This is far from an exhaustive list of WIPs.

My so-called scarf, from here.

I really like this pattern, but it’s been on the needles for ages because I keep being distracted by other things. I am having strange issues with pooling – everything was going well and then the colours started to align into vertical stripes.

Happy coloured slipper sock, based on this pattern. The colours in this photo are really bad, but you get the idea: it’s a brightly coloured striped sock. I still need to weave in the ends, which I hate doing, and make the other one.

More coming soon

This is a test post. I know test posts are annoying, but I just tried to view my empty blog and it apparently cannot be found on the server. I am inept with technology and don't want to type out something long and picture filled only for posting to fail and me to loose it.

So, test.