Evenin' all. Project blog header continues. Flowers for its edge are blooming, mostly of the crocheted variety, but also a few knitted ones. And there's a butterfly. This is yesterday and today's haul:- And here's the total group so far:- I'll sew them around the edge of the blog header when they're all done. I'm a little out of my comfort zone with this stuff, because I like big, solid, get-lost-in-the-detail-for-weeks projects rather than making small things, but it's fun Continue Reading
Archives for November 2013
Knitted flowers, crocheted flowers
Work on the blog header continues. Now that the header itself is finished, I'm crocheting/knitting some foliage and flowers to go round the edge. Progress is slow:- I am particularly keen on these rosebuds. It's amazing what you can achieve at 3am when you're too preoccupied to sleep! All the flowers are from this book. 'Tis the only book on the subject I could find locally, but I do like the fact that it's bicraftual, rather than focusing on solely knitting or solely Continue Reading
Knitting in the Real World: PART TWO.
Continued from the post-before-last. In case you missed it, I'm aiming - in my amateurish way - to plug the gaps left by the knitting books. So, we've covered knitting whilst being climbed by toddlers, knitting whilst drunk, and the serious perils of knitting whilst emotionally overwrought. What's left? Oh yes:- 3. How to knit lying down Isn't it ludicrous that knitting books don't address this important skill? Or am I the only person who postpones turning the light off for "just one more Continue Reading
Cutting a steek, and blocking your knitting
(I know, I promised part two of previous post. But a stinking cold has interfered. It's coming.) So, the knitted blog header is knitted. Just need to crochet some flowers for its edge. I thought I'd share a few photos of the knitting/steeking/blocking process with you, though, because not so very long ago words such as 'steek' terrified me, and words such as 'blocking' confused me, and I want to prove to anyone similarly anxious that like pretty much anything in knitting, it's not actually Continue Reading
Knitting in the real world: PART ONE.
When I passed my driving test (23 years ago - yeek!) my lovely but delightfully eccentric driving instructor looked at me seriously and said, "And now, you must learn to drive." He meant, of course, that learning to pass one's test is a little different from learning to be a competent driver. He had a point. (This was one of the more conventional things that he said, bless 'im. During our lessons in rural south Wales, he'd always make me drive over one particular crossroads in the middle of the Continue Reading
Autumn: good enough to knit/crochet
Is it my imagination, or have the autumn colours been particularly rich and gorgeous this year? If I could capture them in yarn form, I would. And it's such a good year for fruit/berries. Today I took the twinnage for a walk (translation: they sulked in the buggy, which I pushed and pushed up a long hill). We saw hips in abundance:- And pyracantha with variegated berries. Can you tell how much I love variegation? And I've mentioned before how this area was once the centre Continue Reading
Knitted blog header
Ahhhhh, I'm back in my comfort zone. :-) Stranded knitting in variegated yarn. :-) You know how many looooooong days it took me to knit those dolls? Well in a mere 24 hours I've knitted half of the header for this blog. That's 4158 stitches - sounds like a lot, but progress is fast. I'm working on circular needles, so no pesky purling, and stranded / fair isle knitting is, I promise you, not difficult. I'll probably do some 'how to' photos at a later date, to show you how easy it is to design Continue Reading
Knitting is in fashion
So, d'you think this new-fangled* knitting malarkey will catch on? Actually, I fear that we're becoming trendy. This makes me a little nervous, because anything that is currently trendy will, perforce, soon be deeply untrendy. Take today, for example. I had to pop out in the car to a nearby town. On the way, I passed this bus stop:- Then I stopped for petrol. It seems that Cadbury has gone all knitted for Christmas. Obviously I had to buy the following items so that I could photograph Continue Reading
Knitted family dolls… FINISHED!
Meet the family. :-) They're done! I have knitted us, and we do bear at least a passing resemblance to ourselves. Here we are: me, Mr TwistedYarn the stoic spouse, and the toddler twinnage. Can't tell the difference between the twins? Nor can I, half the time. Anyway here we are, saying hello. And here we are again:- And here we are enjoying our photo-shoot, never knowingly camera-shy:- Just in case you want to knit your own family too, all of these dolls are based on Continue Reading
(Still) knitting dolls
Toy knitters of the yarniverse, I salute you. I bow down before your attention to detail. I applaud your mastery of the miniature. I hadn't appreciated the amount of fiddly work that goes into your creations. So what's that got to do with this blog? Well, the dolls that I'm knitting to look like me, Mr TwistedYarn, and the twinnage, for the 'about' page still aren't quite finished. We're two wellies and a few facial features away from completion. The effort hasn't been helped by Mr TY Continue Reading