Curly Wurly

Every so often something just pushes its way to the head of the queue and forces me to knit it NOW! I had no intention of knitting a shawl. I have two on the needles currently (Brown As - a traditional triangle lace shawl and Lacewing a free form knitted and crocheted shawl inspired by the colours of a blue wren's wing). I really didn't plan to make another. But Melba (one of the moderators of Ravelry's International Free Form group) dangled this pattern under my nose and even though I didn't find the original very inspiring knitted as it was in a single colour, there was enough mystery in trying to figure out how it was constructed to make me drag some yarn out of the stash and just knit up a little sample to see how it worked. (Note to self for future reference: this was in hindsight perhaps a bad idea. Resist the intriguing knitting puzzle a little harder next time).

This pattern with its use of short row sections and dropped stitches was a fascinating and addictive knitting exercise.You know of the 'just one more bit' and then I'll put it down go do the housework / complete tedious marking / insert any essential but boring chore here. I'd never done dropped stitches on purpose before (though there have been lots by accident over a long knitting career). I'd find myself insanely giggling inside each time I deliberately dropped and unraveled a stitch. I'm sure the knitting police were secretly watching me flaunting the laws of good knitting and waiting in the wings to slap me with a ticket for illegal knitting.

More by accident than design I'd knitted my little sample piece (it ended up becoming part of the aforementioned Lacewing) in a gorgeous varigated cream, grey and tan yarn. I discovered this pattern just shows off a short repeat variegated yarn to absolute perfection. And in my stash I had just the perfect thing to use: two balls of a acrylic print called Instinctive designed to knit up into a sort of a fake dead animal print.

Mel is responsible for the inspiration behind the name. I was knitting this and she said it reminded her of a chocolate coated something. The wave like patterning and the fact the colour is a mix of chocolate, white chocolate and caramel together with it’s wavy pattern reminds us of a Cadbury Curly Wurly chocolate bar. So Curly Wurly it is. (Though it was very nearly Chocolate Covered Pretzel)

Pattern: Summit Shawl by Mandie Harrington from Knitty Spring+Summer 2010 - a free pattern
Needles: 4mm straights
Yarn: Moda Vera Instinctive, colour 51, black, white and caramel, 100% Acrylic, used 2 by 100 g balls. Bought on sale for $1 each. (So yes, total cost only $2!)
Total elapsed knitting time: 11 days....

It wasn't a totally smooth knit though. There was some extreme frogging involved. I initially started knitting this to the width suggested in the pattern (15 columns) and completed almost two full repeats. However, I only had two balls on this yarn and wouldn’t get the length I needed. So I frogged it and cast on again with only 8 columns - more of a scarf / stole width.

It garnered some interesting comments on Ravelry on the way. I got told that the colour made it look likes hundreds of baby snakes together. Hundreds of snakes. That would be scary to wear around your shoulders….

The original knit in progress shot that inspired the hundreds of snakes comment

I wet blocked the shawl when I finished it but it didn’t hold its shape when dry and the pins were removed due to the acrylic yarn. I wore it once but wasn't happy with it because it didn't drape nicely and kept slipping. So I decided to aggressively steam block it to 'kill' the acrylic. Much happier with the finished stole / shawl now!

The photo-shoot took place on a glorious spring afternoon. Mel is an inspired photographer sometimes and she deserves a giant pat of the back today for making both the shawl and me look good.

Not sure I can pull it off as a head scarf.

The back view

Not so little boy blue

Little boy blue come blow your horn
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.
Where is the little boy who looks after the sheep?
He's under the haystack fast asleep.

What does the phrase 'Little Boy Blue' conjure up for you? Is it the classic nursery rhyme (above) or maybe you are thinking of the well-known painting by Thomas Gainsborough - The Blue Boy? For me now the phrase will always bring to mind a highly successful hand-knitted jumper - something neat, masculine, retro, delightfully textured and vaguely hipster.

Half the fun of a new project is naming it. This jumper is the first one I have made my son since he was a little baby in nappies. In hindsight, waiting to knit the boy a jumper until he was a full grown adult sized male was probably a little bit of a silly idea in terms of the amount of work involved.

This jumper began its knitting journey at Easter this year. Whilst the boy was home from Uni for the Easter break we stash dived and liberated some woolblend yarn gifted to my stash at least 10 years or so ago though I think it was originally purchased sometime in the dim dark 1980s. This rich navy blue always reminded me of the school jumpers of my youth and was never something I would consider using myself. But it was what the boy chose and looking at the finished garment, it was an inspired choice on his behalf.

Then we had to choose a pattern. We hunted patiently through my embarrassingly huge collection of knitting magazines and trawled the Ravelry database the boy having previously exhausted the archives of Knitty. In the pile of classic knitting pattern books, we found this absolute gem from the 1970s.

Despite the lurid bad taste of the cover, the other designs are simple, classic and elegant. We swatched for bit and eventually chose the imaginatively named Jumper No. 3. I measured the dimensions of the boy and packed him back off the University.

Pattern: Jumper number 3 from Man Talk
Needles: 3 1/4 mm needles (for bands) and 4 mm needles (for pattern)
Yarn: Target Nomad Woolblend (80% Acrylic, 20% Wool) DK weight

I started this jumper with the sleeves. Sleeves make great public transport knitting. These sleeves did train journeys, long distance car trips and helped me cheer on the eldest daughter at her cheerleading competition. It was great fun to knit, a deceptively simply pattern that flowed off the needles. (But I kept being unfaithful and knitted on other projects instead).

But a few weeks ago, the realities of a cold wet, Victorian winter began hitting home and boy bet me that I couldn't finish his jumper in a week. He was coming home for the weekend and pleaded for it to be finished by the time he was ready to go back. So I took stock. I had done both the sleeves and half the back. I put on my speed knitting skates and off we went. It did help that the Commonwealth Games were on and that there is just such a wonderful knitting synergy between excessive sport on TV and productive knitting time.

Maybe not under a haystack! But definitely fast asleep. Saturday afternoon couch napping.

I admit it wasn't looking promising. It was Friday night and I had the back finished but the only the band of the front. But I knuckled down. The needles fairly flew and by Sunday morning I had the neck band and the finishing / sewing up to go. The buttons are from my grandmother's button collection.

This has to be my most successful knitting project for ages. It fits the boy like a glove, he loves it and it looks like it could be a bought one. I used up almost all of the 9.5 balls of wool I had in my stash.

I leave you today with a gorgeous shot of the boy full dressed in knitwear by his mother. I love the beanie too.

Funky Chunky

I must really love my middle daughter, Mel. She has the ability to charm, cajole or just plain nag me into knitting for her. Last year I made her lots of accessories (hats and a cowl) before her giant European adventure. The piece de resistance was a co-designed and created cabled masterpiece: Cables of Europe. (She has promised a guest post on the knitwear tour of Europe very soon). I do know what it is about Mel's level of persuasion; she appeals to my vanity. It's secretly very flattering that she thinks my knitting skills are up to her exacting fashion standards. This is the ultimate compliment for a knitting mummy - when your adult children want you to knit garments for them.

Mel likes to set me a knitting challenge to or an interesting puzzle to knit. So when we found this Lion Brand Sideways Cable Pullover I was happy to knit it for her. However, the bobbles had to go! Bobbles are one of those knitting elements that knitters are bipolar about - we either love them or hate them. I'm firmly in the hate camp. Mel felt that were a design element that actually detracted from the overall fashionable quality of the jumper too. Bobbles are so 80s and not in a good way.

I had to buy yarn for this as I had nothing bulky enough in the stash. The yarn we picked is light and a 65% acrylic, 35% wool blend in a gorgeous heathered dark gray.

In some ways this was a really easy and gratifying project. But I also found it a hard slog. This is at the edge of my comfort zone in terms of wool weight and yarn size. I don’t like large needles and thick yarn. The straights I used for the sleeves and the front / back are plastic and the flow of yarn over needles was a little sticky. The concentration required for making this symmetrical length wise across the garment with three different cable patterns of different repeat lengths meant it didn’t make good television knitting. There was also the running modification of removing bobbles as I went.

It also became too big too quickly to be easily portable knitting. It’s a serious lap full. I completed the sideways single section that is the sleeves and body and got the cables to flow nicely from one side to the other and across the sleeves. It was seamed and the stitches picked up for the neck. (It did take me three goes and some intense mathematics to do this to get the right number of stitches with even spacing across the neck). The two by two rib on the neck was nice mindless knitting. But the neck was very long before being folded double and seamed.

Pattern: Lion Brand Sideways Cable Pullover a free pattern
Yarn: Mode Vera Fotini 10 ply / aran weight 65% Acrylic, 35% Wool
Needles: 5.5 mm straights and an 80cm circular needle

This jumper has been a yardstick of my love for Mel. Every time she has seen me being unfaithful with another project she has mournfully turned puppy dog eyes on me and sadly proclaimed "You don't love me anymore. You're not knitting my jumper". I'd make sure I pointed out when I was actually knitting her jumper.

See Mel, I really do love you. I finished your jumper!
(Thanks to Mel and the boy for the knitwear modelling photos in some authentic Aussie bush).