I knit so I don't kill people
Continuing to learn with Mikey (of http://thecrochetcrowd.com) via email and video how to knit with Pompom yarn. I’m still stuck on casting on, so he’s sent me this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msUZAqQGReg
I want to make this Pompom scarf into a Christmas present for a friend. Shhh!
Took some photos of my hand-knitted scarves and baby blankets today. I’d forgotten how many I had stashed away. They’ll hopefully be up on Shorn Lambs soon!
Baby blankets are knitted with Lion Brand Homespun yarn, using US 15mm needles.
Measurements:
Width = 45 cm
Length = 53 cm
Mouse over each one to see the name and price.
I knit lots of different types of scarves. Here’s a thin, long one, modeled on the Goth Grape and Lavender Baby Blanket:
You can buy this scarf right here.
Here’s another of my scarves in progress – a pink jacquard scarf in progress:
400 grams of yarn!
400 grams of yarn!
Like I said in an earlier post, this is called a jacquard pattern. It allows the pattern to make itself without any effort on my part, which is awesome! Here are some more photos of it, and you can see it’s a little bigger now.
I left this tail of the yarn longer because I don't know whether I'll want to add fringes later.
A hell of a lot of yarn!
Over at Starship Craftybiz, Tara has posted an idea for Silent Disco, which came from a copylicious blog post, quoted below:
I went to a SILENT DISCO at a music festival last year. Was I the last person to hear about these? Hundreds of people dancing in total silence, with a silent DJ who looks really into it.
You can hear everything if you put on the wireless headphones they give out. It’s also fun to take them off.
After about 15 minutes of dancing, you’re ready to go.
It’s a nice metaphor for editing.
Editing feels stupid at first. No one knows what you’re doing over there—they can’t hear the music. But they can tell if you’re into the music, and that’s what counts.
Writing is like the secret music in your headphones. Editing is like dancing.
Editing is best in short bursts, and in the right mood. You need to keep it loose, but dance with intention, my friend.
Want to grab a pair of wireless headphones and try it?
Read more here.
And that’s what the pink scarf is.
The amazing Georganne of Banyan Tree Yarns is going to help me calculate gauge for my Seaspray shawl. (I really tried hard myself a few times yesterday, but my artsy-fartsy brain eventually held a gun to itself - Are you feeling lucky, punk? – and threatened to pull the trigger unless I handed the job over to a professional.)
So I can’t work on that today until she gets back to me, and I’m still waiting for the skein of black Jiffy yarn I bought from her to arrive so I can finish my Shivanaut scarf.
Bet you thought I’d be sitting around the house, twiddling my thumbs, going into knitting angsty, yarn withdrawal, climbing the walls and pulling out my hair.
As our eighteen-month-old niece, Emily, would say, wagging her little finger, “No, no, no, no!”
I have pulled an older, sadly neglected project out of the closet:
It’s a pink scarf, knitted with a gigantic 400g ball of Sensatione yarn that my DH spotted on sale in an Iceland shop. The yarn is multicoloured, so as you knit, it naturally assumes an interesting variation of different shades of pink that go all over the place. That’s called a jacquard pattern.
Measurements
4mm needles, garter stitch (knit every row)
40 stitches per row
I’ll just keep going until I feel like stopping…
And I have decided, once it’s finished, that a portion of the profits of the sale on Etsy will go to either Macmillan or Cancer Research UK – because it’s a pink scarf and people are suckers for pink, cancer-related things.
Another video in this week’s blog series of Men Who Knit…this was just too cute not to share!
Continuing this week’s theme of Men Who Knit, I bring you the video of…
Two Guys in Bed Knitting for World Peace
They knitted for 3 days straight, and raised $2500 USD, donating it all to the Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence.
This video covers the basic geeky arts of knitting and purling, as well as casting on (how you start a project) and casting off (how you finish a project). Because they’re outdoors, the natural sunlight makes things easy to see. The demonstrators explain things without jargon, which is another thing that makes this easy to understand for the novice yarnaholic. And there’s also a guy knitter in the video, proving once again that knitting is not just a woman’s thing – men can do it, too!
Fiber-optics???? Woo, I need to get some of these!!!
But actually the next thing I want to try is working beads into a knitting project.
I have a skein of this yarn (sometimes called “bobble” yarn) I bought in Saltcoats in 2008 but I could never figure it out. What also delights me about this video is that it’s a man doing it! Yay for men who knit!!!!! Now, I just need to find out if he has made videos that show how to cast on and cast off with this yarn.
Michael doesn’t have videos showing how to cast on or off with this yarn, but I messaged him on Youtube to see if he could create them.
Casting on is accomplished with using regular yarn of a similar or same colour for the first row. It makes it much less complicated. The stitch used is a garter stitch – every row is knitted. It would be too complicated to try and mess with a stockinette stitch (where you knit and purl alternate rows), and doing that would make the scarf roll inwards.
My current project is a set of seven scarves, for Havi Brooks’ Playground Shop at The Fluent Self. They are knit with Lion Brand Jiffy yarn (Shocking Pink, and Black), which I bought from a fabulous online yarn shop called Banyan Tree Yarns. Georganne Cauchi, the proprietor, has been helping me with many of my latest projects – determining how many skeins I need is a very simple maths calculation, which my artsy-fartsy brain seizes up on.
14 August, 2011: I’m starting the sixth scarf today! The first five were knit with stockinette stitch, and unfortunately roll inwards; that’s just the way that stitch behaves. So with the remaining two scarves, I’ll do a garter stitch and see if they stay flattened.
04 November 2011: I’m about a third of the way through the seventh and final scarf. It’s also being done in garter stitch, and it turns out that this type of stitch does make the scarf stay much flatter.
“Oh, my stars and garters!”
When Beast/Hank McCoy says this in the movie X3: The Last Stand, it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect a brawny, furry fellow to exclaim, which is why it’s funny. Ordinarily, you’d expect something more brutish to come out of such a tough-looking guy’s mouth. But Beast, as we learn, is a well-educated, cultured, and refined gentleman (who quietly bemoans his eternal torment of shedding on the furniture; I can only imagine how much he spends each month on lint rollers to keep his suits immaculate!).
I went searching for the origin of the phrase and found this:
Meaning:
A jocular exclamation or expression of astonishment.
Origin
‘Oh, my stars and garters’ is now very much an American expression.
‘Stars’ has been a favourite in British exclamations for many centuries; for example, ‘bless my stars’, ‘thank my lucky stars’ – both 17th century coinages. This usage of the word dates back to at least the 16th century, when it was used by Christopher Marlowe in the play The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, circa 1593:
“O my starres! Why do you lowre [bring down in rank] unkindly on a king?”
The stars in question are the astrological bodies and one’s stars were one’s position in life, or disposition.
Moving on to ‘garters’ and the connection isn’t with astrology, or even hosiery, but with chivalry. The Noble Order of the Garter is the highest heraldic order that the British monarch can bestow…’Stars and garters’ was used as a generic name for the trappings of high office and, by extension, the people who occupied such; for example, this piece from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, circa 1712:
“While Peers, and Dukes, and all their sweeping train, And Garters, Stars, and Coronets appear.”
‘Oh, my stars and garters’, when used as a humourous exclamation, appears to be a merging of the previous ‘star’ exclamations and the ‘stars and garters’ associated with the honours given to the great and the good.
(Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/my-stars-and-garters.html)
Way to go, furball.
Many people ask me about why I photograph so many of my Etsy projects with one of my cats, Spock. His white bib provides a great contrast against my subject, and he loves posing for the camera.
Other than photos that have Spock in them, I keep my finished projects in sealed plastic containers, to keep cat fur away from them as much as possible. After I take photos, everything goes right back into the boxes.
If you have allergies, I’ll be happy to run your purchase through a laundry and dry cycle before sending it to you.
I keep these containers in The Bat Cave.
Plastic containers where I keep my yarn and knitting supplies.
I have five of these (and counting!)
Here is another of my cats: Elsa.
Elsa, my black DSH (domestic shorthair) "helping" me knit in January 2008. In 2011, she's 13 years old, alive and well, living with my mom in Winnipeg, Canada. Her idea of "helping" me knit was to chew on my needles. if they were plastic, she'd chew the ends off and leave them all raggedly. But you can see the love in her eyes as she snuggled up next to me on the sofa.
