buzz buzz

On By spilikinsIn knitting

Three years between posts might be a record for me, but it’s also about the same amount of time I’ve gone between knitting projects, probably the biggest gap I’ve had since my teens. The last few years have been busy, and right now is no less busy as I’m preparing for a house move, but ironically that’s what’s sparked my picking up the needles. I’m being forced to re-evaluate my yarn stash, in the same way all of our belongings are being examined with a Kondo-like mindset, whereby the question of ‘are you worth house space?’ currently has the added proviso of ‘are you worth moving van space?’.

In an attempt to make things easier, I’ve started thinking about stashbusting projects that would produce the most useful objects, and would also be good tv knitting. Blankets are always useful, and I remember my mum ploughing through acres of DK and aran weight yarn that she’d inherited from my gran by rattling off giant crochet squares whilst watching various of her favourite tv shows, all of which I still own, some of which are more ‘well-loved’ (in appearance – all of them were very much appreciated). The more multicoloured of these we called ‘butterfly blankets’, and they have kept all of my kids cosy at some point or another. I don’t have a photo to share of these at the moment as they’re all packed away, but they may make an appearance in a future post. Either way, most of the heavier weight yarns in my stash are destined to become new blankets in one way or another, I’ve decided. I haven’t decided how much thought to put into colour coordination, part of me is saying ‘go random’ and the other part of me is saying ‘really, don’t’. I might consult my younger daughter, she’s got an eye for these things. I’m also not sure whether to go and look for a blanket pattern, and whether to knit or crochet, but I’ll work on that once I’ve figured out exactly how much yarn I’ve got (one benefit of the giant multicoloured crochet square is that you can very much go with the flow, with minimal stress and effort, something which currently sounds most appealing).

The 4ply stash, however, has prompted me to make a purchase I’ve deliberated on in the past. Having now taken the plunge I’ve already made a start on the beekeeper’s quilt, by tiny owl knits. Bought from ravelry on Friday, I’ve currently got one hexpuff finished and stuffed, and another cast on, though last night was the Doctor Who finale which demanded my undivided attention so I’ll have to finish that one today. The creamy yarn is Drops Safran, the purple is possibly King Cole Giza Cotton 4ply, and most of the hexpuffs I’ll be knitting will likely use either one of these yarns in various shades.

Given that I’ll need to make a good few (hundred) of these to produce a quilt at the end, I know I won’t be finished before our move, but the other great thing about this project is that it’s modular, so you can make little tiny things from very portable bits of stash, something that half-finished full sized blankets don’t have going for them.

The pattern printout these are sitting on is a long suffering WIP and very much not tv knitting – it’s the Evenstar Shawl, by Susan Pandorf, which I bought and started during the pandemic. So far, I have picked it up and looked at it, and not done much else, having got (I think) nine rows in, way back when. The yarn and shawl are both incredibly beautiful, so I’ve made a little promise to them and once I’ve worked out exactly where I stopped (argh), I’m going to do a little row here and there until I get into the swing of things – I’ve knitted shawls and watched tv before, it’s not impossible once you’re at a stage you feel comfortable with (or when you’re doing mahoosive knit rows that take a while). Coincidentally, one of the other things I’ve done recently to ease the stress of preparing for a move has been to pick up Tolkien again as my bedtime reading, it’s one of my favourite bits of comfort reading. I finished The Hobbit a few weeks back (my son’s since made a start on it for the first time, and is enjoying it immensely, which makes me immensely happy), and I’m now not too far off the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.

(The yarn isn’t quite that magenta, in fact it isn’t magenta at all, it’s a dusky dark pink with a very small amount of variegation to it, but my phone camera can’t pick that up very well.)

spinning (not just plates)

On By spilikinsIn knittingLeave a comment

I’m still here, and it’s time for another update. The rejig of our family life that was imminent last year has re-rejigged itself – my husband has gone back to work full time, having been offered a decent job, and so my knitting/spinning has returned to the level it was at previously – fits and starts, with all the other bits of my life jostling for priority!

I’ve got some yarn on order for another post box topper, hoping to get that done in the next week or so in time for our village summer fair, and this afternoon I’m going out to a knit’n’chat group in Kilsyth with my spinning wheel. Before Christmas I took some dowels, CDs, fibre, and my Louet along to a craft skill-sharing group run in our village for everyone to try their hand at, and recently one of the women at the group asked me if I could come along to their knitting group with them too. I’m always up for encouraging people to take up spinning, so that’s me organising my bits of fluff this morning ready for an hour or two of chatting, treadling, and probably a bit of dropping spindles.

I don’t have any wool fibre left to take with me, at the skill-sharing group somebody had brought along some bits of coloured wool fibre from a needle felting kit, but all I have personally (aside from a little handful of silk leftover from my wedding shawl) is plant fibre.

I bought some carbonised bamboo from Wingham Wool Work back in November, so I’ll be taking that, and possibly the ramie I got from them too, though that’s really slippery so I think I’ll just be giving them the bamboo to start on. The other thing I ordered at the time was corn fibre, and when I opened it at the demo before Christmas it smelled very strongly of some kind of chemical. I assumed it was maybe flame retardant or something, and had meant to email them to check it was okay, but forgot – having just opened it, the smell has faded (though there’s still a smell), but the fibre is ruined, sadly. It basically just breaks when you draw it apart, at first I thought it was just a very short fibre, but no, it’s snapping. There was no mention of this (and any necessary airing or other care required) on the site itself, so I’m a little disappointed, but I really should have followed it up straight away so that’s that. I probably won’t be buying more of that from there, though.

I’ve also got my little collection of plant fibres from Flora Fibres that I’m still a little too nervous to use on my wheel until I get a bit more practise with plant fibres, and one of these is flax. This is something that I’m hoping to have a go at growing in the not too distant future – one of the other things that has been distracting me recently has been a project that’s almost been going for two years now, to set up a site for community allotments in our village. It’s taken a long time, but we’re not far from arranging a lease from the council of a field within the village that we can use. While it started primarily as an allotment site, the project has metamorphosed into a place for wildlife, as well as community growing and get-togethers, alongside the individual plots, and some of what we hope to do there includes heritage craft activities.

Natural dyeing has been a popular suggestion, and while I was researching this (and other crafts such as basketry) I stumbled across a project to revitalise flax growing in Scotland. This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole but I ended up reading about the old flax mills locally, notably in a village called Waterside, just along the road from the village I live in. One of the things that I think would be interesting to do as a group, then, would be to try growing, spinning, dyeing and weaving some linen, from ‘seed to shawl’, as it were.

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The mill was dismantled years ago, and nothing remains of it now, sadly. It was, by all accounts, such a lovely place that people would travel from Glasgow to see it on the ‘Puffer’ steamboats along the Forth & Clyde canal, and which is presumably why this postcard of it exists.

 

baubles and beads (no bangles)

On By spilikinsIn knittingLeave a comment

I mentioned a few weeks ago that there were things afoot, and I realise I haven’t said anything else since, so this post is an update on that, with some added extras.

I’ve spent the last three weeks knitting little covers for baubles, and I have to say it’s a little addictive. I’m going to be writing up my pattern for one of the designs eventually, and the ones I’ve made are for sale – I’ve already sold a few, but while I’m also taking a few custom orders in the run up to Christmas, there are still some ready made ones available, listed on my facebook page here –

https://www.facebook.com/spilikins/posts/6930812596929612

So far I’ve done a few different lace stitch patterns – diagonal mesh, leaf lace, little arrowhead and a few improvised combinations of yarnovers and k2togs – but by far my favourite is an Estonian lace motif, the double waterlily. I got the basic idea for the eyelet baubles after seeing a vintage pattern on the wayback machine and adapting it to fit the size of bauble I had, and after trying various yarn weights I decided to have a go at something a little more decorative.

There are lots of charts and tutorials out there for all kinds of lace stitch patterns, but I found the waterlily on a blog which sadly appears to have been dormant for the last ten years, called ‘New Lace, Old Traditions‘. All the charts for the motifs there are available as free pdf downloads on ravelry, for knitters to use in their work.

I’ve knitted a few pieces from patterns comprised of traditional Estonian lace stitch patterns before, and find their almost organic forms particularly beautiful. I’m fairly sure the first one would have been Evelyn Clark’s Swallowtail Shawl, which I knitted for my husband’s granny in 2009, and blogged about here. It’s a lovely pattern, though there are *lots* of nupps to knit. The second one was, I think, Laminaria, which I’m ashamed to say has still never been blocked (coincidentally, you can see the fibre I dyed for that in the post before the one about the Swallowtail).

I’ve still not changed anything on the site as yet, I’m hoping to get set up with a proper host and domain name and all that jazz, but have yet to decide on who to go with (I’m thinking bluehost, but need to do a bit more research). Once that’s done I’ll be able to play with the inner workings a bit more.

The main change that I alluded to in my previous post has basically been that I’ve started to focus on being more business-like with my knitting, helped in part by my husband currently only working part time. ‘Business like’ sounds dreadful, but it will hopefully mean that I’m a lot more organised (like I used to be, when I started this blog), and I’m counting on the knock-on effect of that being that I’m a lot more productive, which doesn’t sound quite so dreadful.

I’ve already done much more research into yarns and fibre than I’ve done in the last couple of years, and I’m hoping that I can feed back sales of little knits into my business, buy more yarn, and develop and test more patterns. And, I’ll be honest, I’m hoping this will rekindle the spark that got a bit knocked out of me when I took the decision to stop using wool (it has to be doable, seeing as I never touched it for the first twenty odd years of my knitting life).

I’m also hoping to branch out a little, and record a few video tutorials for youtube. If I can get my setup right before Christmas the first will be one of these baubles, they’re such a quick knit and while they look quite complex, they’re just two repeats (horizontally), with only one intricate stitch – maybe not good for a complete novice knitter, but anyone that can happily knit stocking stitch will be able to pick them up with just a little extra guidance, I think, and it’s the kind of thing that youtube is made for.

the colour of nostalgia

On By spilikinsIn christmas crafts, knittingLeave a comment

I had a quick run out to the Hobbycraft store in Easterhouse this week to see if I could pick up some yarn to start work on some Christmas knits, and completely drew a blank on getting any festive red yarn in a shade I liked, let alone a red and white in the same yarn.

Determined not to come home emptyhanded, I chose these –

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They’re not what you’d call traditional colours, but the combination somehow reminded me of Christmas when I was really young, with its twisty crepe garlands, and silk and glass baubles hung on the tree – there would definitely have been some turquoise and silver somewhere in there too, not to mention quite a few plastic decorations. (I lost a whole bunch of these in a house move, but I don’t beat myself up too much about missing the couple of boxes that got left behind in the cupboard in the hall – I’d not long had my second child, and there was a lot going on!)

The yarn is Patons 100% Cotton DK, in Raffia, Fuchsia and Kiwi.

I’m now trying to work out what I’m going to make with them, and in what combination/s. I’m not sure whether socks (particularly stranded motifs) will work, they might look a bit of a mess – stripes of varying thicknesses might work, although my other thought for little Christmas knits for this year was bookmarks, but I’m not sure how I’d combine these colours for those, either. It’s possible they might work in twos ie green/bronze, purple/bronze and maybe even purple/green, worked in double knitting so the patterns would be reversible, but that would also make them chunkier than would probably be ideal.

Time for some experimentation, I think… and maybe a trip to a different yarn store, to see if I can get myself some red and white for some more traditional knits.

things are afoot…

On By spilikinsIn knittingLeave a comment

(Not strange things, and probably not at the Circle-K.)

You’ll likely have noticed that it’s been quiet here for some time.

There are a number of reasons for this, initially it was mostly down to a project I’ve been working on for the last eighteen months, but latterly, we’ve had to adjust to a major change in our family’s circumstances. I’m happy to announce, though, that while that adjustment has been far from smooth and easygoing, it has enabled myself and my husband to make a lot of changes for the better, in terms of both our family and working lives.

This will likely be reflected in upcoming changes to this website, about which there will certainly be more details to follow very soon, but for now, here’s the progress of the socks I was working on way back at the start of the year – one down, a little less than one to go!

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