Ruched Headband

I made this for myself for skiing as I hate wearing my hair down on the mountain and I wanted something to keep my ears warm but my bun in tact!

This was made with leftover Artesano Alpaca DK and is very loosely based on a Drops pattern but if you want mine here it is. It’s absurdly simple and takes about 2 hours:

Materials:

Scant half skein of DK yarn, preferably something warm like alpaca
3.5mm needles

Pattern

CO 21sts and knit in seed stitch for 38cm, slipping the last stitch of each row to prevent curling at the edges.
Sew ends together to form band

For the centre strip CO 9sts and knit 44 rows in seed stitch, sew ends together around main band over the join

Cute.

A trio of fairisle hats

This Christmas was a Christmas of hats. Beautiful hand-knitted, alpaca, fairisle hats. Selection runs left to right as follows:

Purl Bee ‘Little Fairisle Hat‘ only available in child size I sized this up myself, it’s still fairly snug but good for a small headed person and I love the colourwork on this one. Made from delicious yarn bought from the alpaca farm in the summer. I should have used smaller needles for the ribbing though.

Jared Flood’s ‘Seasons Hat‘ from Brooklyn Tweed. Now I don’t normally buy patterns for things like hats, it seems pointless, but this pattern was worth every penny. I love the fairisle pattern and the design is spot on with a selection of colour combinations and sizes, plus you get the decreases in chart and written format. The twisted rib is ace and sceptical as I was about the use of 3 different needle sizes for a hat, I am now convinced. It’s an awesome hat. I have made three already, the one pictured was for my sister who has added a pompom. I didn’t think it needed it but it does look cute. My sister got a fairisle design book for Christmas so I will use this pattern as a base to experiment with different colourwork options.

Another Purl Bee number, this time ‘Giacomo’s Baby Hat‘. This was also a resize job, made for my mum who has a BIG head! In hindsight I should have made the rib section longer and maybe used the twisted rib but it still works, and it fits her which is the main thing. My mother really likes a ridiculously large bobble so I toyed with adding a huge white one but in the end I let her choose and she went for the red one. The main colour is from the alpaca farm too, from ‘Mr Tumnus’, how adorable is THAT?!

Here she is, proving it really is excellent for skiing.

 

200th BLOG POST PARTY! Can you believe I’ve produced so much drivel?! In celebration I will be taking part in the pay-it-forward handmade challenge, see here for details of how you can benefit from my boundless generosity.

Fairisle Cardigan Kit

Wow, I finished this almost a full year and a half ago but totally failed to photograph it, I think it’s because I was planning on styling it better than I have… Photos obviously taken by me (as no one else was here, also I should probably have done my hair, *sigh*) but with my Dad’s camera so slightly better quality, same lower-than-average composition.

This is a vintage knit, it was found in my mother’s, next-door-neighbour’s, aunt’s loft. That’s how you get ALL the best stuff. It’s an ‘instant’ fairisle kit from pure shetland wool and was clearly bought on holiday in Scotland, probably in the 50s judging by the shape of her boobs, but maybe 60s looking at the hair… Anyway it had been enthusastically started with 3/4 of the back panel knitted (excellent choice as that is clearly the most boring bit) and one side panel. Fortunately it was easy enough to work out the size chosen and it was a 12 so would fit me – all good news so far.

The bad news:

1. this is pure wool, spun before the advent of modern processing techniques and so was scratchy as hell to knit with! It is softening up now but it will take time and commitment.
2. The ‘instant’ bit is because the fairisle section is already knitted (which I would have really liked to do myself, I love fairisle knitting) and you have to insert it, what a total fucking pain in the arse THAT was!
3. It’s 4ply yarn, this means it take a bloody long time to knit something this big.

However it’s so long ago now that I have really forgotten how painful it was. To be fair it is the first adult garment I had ever knitted and for that I learnt a lot about seaming, the value of blocking, and  perfect, beautifully even gauge… (or the lack of it)

It is a bit high-necked and unflattering in the bust and waist but I love it, it’s warm and cute, the colours are gorgeous and the fairisle is beautiful. Everyone else thinks it’s gross but I don’t care, I totally fit with the trendies in in Dalston, as long as I don’t tell them I made it…

Vintage Bunny

More poor photography I’m afraid, this time brought to you in the form of a vintage bunny. This is from an original (I think 40s) Patons pattern so the construction is quite fiddly but I like the seaming detail, I think it looks cute (pattern available here). I even made this from vintage yarn bought for the bargain price of £1 a ball at Unravel earlier in the year.

The carrot doesn’t actually belong to him, it’s part of another project (coming soon) but it made his arms look less limp and game so I might make him a smaller one to keep.

I have no idea who this bunny is for, but I just like having him around the house, he is currently guarding the window from preying kitties (this is a lie, they wrestled him to the ground and left him for dead).

Baby Boy Sweater

I made this for a friend’s child, he was named Babhinay and had a Twitter account at 3 months (in utero) and tweets regularly about the day-to-day minutiae of being a baby, you can follow him here.

I’m really pleased with how this turned out in the end, despite appearances it wasn’t a simple knit, you can read the full rant on ravelry if you’re interested in knitting-pattern-based rage.

I really like the yarn, which is the Rico Essentials Merino DK, it knits up slightly smaller than a standard DK but is really smooth and soft and is superwash, what more could you want. Oh it’s only £3.50 a ball, bargain! I also got the coconut shell buttons for 10p each, I think they’re perfect.

I must say I’m getting pretty good at the sewing up these days, the shoulders on this don’t look too bulky and the side seams would be perfect if the basketweave pattern matched up .

I’m considering rewriting the pattern so I can knit it in the round as I do really like the finished article. However,  a better plan might be to transfer the basketweave pattern onto an existing cardigan pattern that I like (thanks Lizzy :D).

Mini Tea Cosy (or is it a Brownie hat?)

As I now mostly work from home I decided I needed a mini teapot, my mum found me this delightfully lurid lime green number which redeems itself only on it’s excellent pouring mechanism.

In order to minimise it’s impact on my lovely new kitchen (and to keep my tea warmer or course!) I decided it needed a cosy. I couldn’t find a pattern for a mini tea cosy anywhere so I made this one up, download the pattern here.

I used some brown cheap british yarn which is too scratchy for clothing but very warm, so ideal for a cosy. However, it doesn’t really show the cable as well as I would like so I might have to make it again in grey which will look better and match the kitchen too.

Anyway, this does the job for now, I had forgotten how boring making pompoms is, this one reminds me of my Brownie hat. The uniform when I was Brownie age consisted of a shapeless brown dress, a brown leather belt with a pouch on it, a yellow crossover tie and a brown bobble hat. It looked like this:

(This is back in the days when ugly people were still allowed to be in publications)

My mother decided the uniform bobble hat was ‘a rip off’ and that she would knit me one instead. I was the laughing stock of my pack, it was huge, really thick so my head looked too small and it had an enormous pompom the size of my fist which moulted brown wool everywhere we went. If I were a weaker child I would have been bullied for this, but I led the mockery of it so it was fine. For some reason my sister was not subjected to the homemade version and got a bloody normal one. She really IS the favourite child.

Actually this teacosy looks a LOT like it, I’m clearly still scarred by the experience.

Professer Zoidberg Mitts

Zoidberg: Wub wub wub wub wub
Hermes: My god! Soon he’ll be as strong and flexible as Hercules and Gumby combined!
Zoidberg: Gumbercules!? I love that guy!

So when I decided a pair of salmon pink fingerless gloves something happened, something that NEVER happens, I thought: ‘i’ve got the perfect yarn in my stash for that’ AND I DID! Amazing eh?

I used a great free pattern called Man Paws for the base of the glove and I finished these in January sometime, but I also ran out of yarn, ANNOYING. I then had to buy another ball which I put off for a long time as the ‘perfect’ yarn was a fairly expensive Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino,

I made up the flip tops/zoidberg head bit using the pick-up-and-knit method from Ysolda’s Snapdragon fliptops but changed the construction. And the eyes came from Knitty’s Flappy Flounder.

If you imagine wearing these wiggling your fingers and muttering ‘wub wub wub wub wub’ to yourselfself, you get the idea. I’m pretty sure these have a very limited life span being, as they are, a completely novelty (and fairly unpractical) item of clothing.

Woolsack Olympic Cushion Project

At the recent Unravel knitting show my mother corralled us into helping her stuff a cushion she had made at a filling station at the event. I must admit I knew she was doing this (vaguely) but hadn’t really paid proper attention so I dragged my feet when she asked us to help her.

The Woolsack project is part of the cultural Olympiad and it’s brief is to welcome every single Olympian to the UK with the gift of a hand-knitted cushion made entirely of British wool. You can find out more here. There is still time to knit a cushion and they have yarn available, you just have to pay the postage.

In actual fact the stuffing was really fun, Amber and I gushed over all the brilliant cushions that had been made and they offered us doughnuts and the stuffing wool was really soft… mmmmm. We asked them how they would decide who got what cushion: would the gold medallist get the ‘best’ ones, and the shit ones go to a first-round-knockout handball team member or similar? 😀  Apparently it’s going to be more a case of getting what you’re given, oh well.

Also the lovely lady who helped us gave Amber and I some wool to make our own cushions, exciting!

I knew immediately what I wanted to do. I had recently seen Polly aka Rubbishknitter’s version of the Paper Dolls sweater with the BBC Micro owl logo as the motif and loved it – it doesn’t get more British than that!

I copied the back from Julie (who I think is the nice lady we met at the event), she has made some lovely cushions for this project and I think the back is really pretty without competing with the front for attention.

Amber used the same basic pattern but used an umbrella motif instead (also very British). We have sent them off with my mum to be filled at a stuffing station very soon.

I guess Usain Bolt will get mine, or maybe Michael Phelps. I can see him now, on the podium, holding my cushion in one hand and a gold medal in the other (because of course he’ll be so attached to it he’ll take it everywhere). He might even cut it into shorts, who knows, wool is very aerodynamic you know.

Quick cross-stitch socks

I made these for my friend Nell for Christmas but I utterly failed photograph them before I gave them to her and was therefore unable to post about them, I’m an idiot.

Anyway she kindly sent me this picture of them in action, hurrah!

This pattern is form the Knitting 24/7 book which I got for Christmas last year. Like most of the patterns in this book, it is fairly badly written (which is a shame as there are lots of nice things in it).

For example: It specifies two needle sizes but doesn’t say which to start with, obviously you can work it out but in a paid for pattern I’d expect it to say, it’s also just not very clearly written, which is fine if you’ve knitted socks before but just seems lazy. In addition the book never specifies the yarn weight used, only the yarn she actually used, which is no help at all. Again I can work this out by looking it up on ravelry but should I have to? No.

FYI it’s an aran weight, I used some lovely Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran which was soft and smooshy and perfect!

That said the pattern on the sock looks lovely and now I’ve done it once I would definitely make them again, a good quick knit for a lovely warm pair of socks.

Snapdragon Mitts

I have very little inspiration for writing this post if I’m honest as I didn’t massively enjoy making these gloves. I started them about three times and kept messing the cable up – only to discover there was a mistake in the pattern on the cable bit, when I checked there was an errata but it was still pretty annoying!

The thumb placement and by extension the fliptop are off centre (and yes I followed the instructions exactly – wish I hadn’t, should have used my own judgement) and the top is too pointy for my liking but now I’m being picky 🙂

However I was really pleased with the cable, it’s very pretty and the gloves are ever-so cosy with this lovely alpaca yarn!