Fine Lines

About the time I began writing this blog (about 6 years or so ago) my children decided that handmade knitwear was actually something you could wear, be seen in public with, acknowledge to all and sundry that 'Yes, it was in fact hand-knitted and my Mum made it for me' and be proud of it. Only a fellow knitter understands the myriad proud feelings that come with your teenage / young adult children arriving at this realisation. We started slowly with accessories and gently progressed to whole garments.

Since then I've made the boy a handmade jumper, a scarf and five hats (as well as a knitted stuffed deer head for the Boy Cave). That reminds me, I've made three of these hats fairly recently. Stay tuned for a hat blog post featuring the boy wearing hats! He also has a queue of matched yarn and jumper / cardigan patterns waiting for me to get around to knitting them.

Not so Little Boy Blue and wearing Graeme the hat!

Examination in brioche

The middle daughter Mel (The Fanciful Fungirl) still lives at home and so is in a prime position for subtle nagging and tempting suggestions of what she really needs knit for her next. Her tally so far is two berets, three beanies, a knitted cloche hat, two pairs of fingerless gloves and two jumpers (and a knitted cover for her tablet computer complete with bumble bees). She also tends to bring out my design instincts, commissioning unique hand knitted pieces.

Funky Chunky

Cables of Europe

Sunrise / Sunset using hand dyed yarn

The eldest Doctor daughter has sadly missed out on her fair share of the knitted bounty to a certain extent. Oh, I've knitted her three berets and a slouchy hat but that is it... (The fact that she knits herself does contribute to this a bit. She made her own intricately cabled cover for her laptop and a lovely seed stitch cowl and last time she was home snaffled some knitting needles and raided the stash for squishy wool  to make some more accessories and cushion covers).

Selbu Modern

Slow Flurry on me, the daughter wearing her own hand knitted seed stitch cowl

She hasn't yet got a hand knit jumper and I decided in November it was time to remedy that. After all November is NaKniSweMo - National Knit a Sweater (of more than 50,000 stitches) Month. This time my needles were going to be dedicated to making a jumper for the Doctor daughter.

Making a jumper for an adult with their own distinct personal style is a process of research and negotiation. We began with looking at the European runway fashion for knitwear for the upcoming Winter season. Brioche, rib, cables and fair-isle (often in monochrome colourways) were the common knitwear themes. Oh and fringes!! Let's not go there, ever! She sent me photos of jumpers she had found in the shops that she had debated buying. It looked like something in a defined rib with shaping flaring out towards the bottom was on the top of her list. The colour choice was easy - grey. We often joke until fairly recently my daughter's entire wardrobe was shades of grey punctuated with black exercise wear and the odd other neutral (cream, white, denim and occasionally mushroom).

A knitted jumper is a big commitment and if done right out of good quality yarn should last for 20 or more years. So what ever we made should be classic enough not to go out of style too quickly. But it needed a modern edge. The jumper we eventually chose is classic fisherman's rib but with very modern lines and shaping - Fisherman Redux.

Pattern: Fisherman Redux by Vera Sanon
Needles: 3.75 mm and 4.5 mm 
Yarn: Bendigo Woollen Mills Stellar 8 Ply, Colourway 105 Shell - 4 by 200 g balls. This is a wool and bamboo blend with a lovely soft drape and lustre.

So we tried to knit this in November... I ordered yarn 1st November as I didn’t have anything suitable in the stash. (Thank Bob for online mail order). I did swatch with some op shop yarn but the texture didn’t do the pattern justice. The yarn arrived Thursday 5th November - swatched to make sure that my gauge was spot on. It was! And then I cast on on Friday night 6th November. I worked up the band - around 1000 stitches and then realized I had started the 1 by 1 rib on a knit and it needed to be a purl. Teach me to think know what I’m doing without carefully reading the pattern…. So I ripped it all out again and followed the pattern instructions for 1 by 1 rib. Only 4 rows and 255 sts on day 1. Saturday 7th November was move the boy home form Geelong at the end of the Uni year - lots of scope for car knitting.

And this is about where real life commitments and November NaKniSweMo knitting plans crashed into each other head on and the knitting plans got stream-rolled by marking, exams and admin plus a major assessment piece for my own study into a twisted smoking wreck. Oh, I tried. I finished the front, back, neck edging and part of a sleeve in November. I started counting stitches and got to over 30,000 for the back and front alone. This is definitely a +50,000 stitches garment.

I’d also like to give a special shout out to Hazel, the 30+ kilo 8 month old puppy with a penchant for yarn and stealth sneak stealing of knitting. I love you for the almost half a front I had to frog and re-knit twice after you took my knitting for a few runs around the backyard. It is really difficult (read this as impossible) to pick up a well dropped stitch in Fisherman's rib!!

I finished this in the post Christmas relaxing period. (I often find this is a really productive time for me knit wise. I like to finish the year with a cleanish slate and I have time to laze and watch the Boxing Day test on TV and let the needles fly away).

This is a knitting success story. It fits Doctor daughter perfectly. She loves it (except for a minor quibble about the width of the sleeves - they’re a little wide for her taste) and I love the sleek modern shaping. The yarn has a gorgeous shine and sheen and is crisp enough to show off the rib to perfection. It looked great even before blocking and amazing after.

Is that really rain - on my new jumper?

So what do you want me to knit for you next, Doctor daughter? (And thanks for playing photo shoot too early one Sunday morning in the rainy city after you'd just finished a full on night shift!) Photo credits for the lovely shots of Doctor daughter to the boy (@larkinsmark on instagram).

Hugging the curves

The first of my New Years knitting resolutions for 2015 was to turn the stash into sweaters... I have quite a number of sweater sized lots in my stash. They take up a lot of room and it's time to seriously use them up.

So I matched the stash to some patterns I liked and swatched for a few sweater projects in January 2015 exploring possibilities.

I dithered on this pattern. I really like the twisting cables from waist to shoulder but was a bit unsure on the peplum idea… However, the back flows so beautifully with the peplum, I think I’ll try it anyway. (God knows my hips are generously sized to say the least at the moment).

What’s in name? The Lion brand patterns have such prosaic names. This one is Cabled Peplum Pullover. I rarely use them for actual project names. The combination of twisted almost plaited cables and the gorgeous tweedy gold yarn reminded me of traditional corn dollies. These are plaited from the last grain of the harvest to give the spirit of the corn somewhere to live till the next planting. Hence ’Spirit of the Corn’ for this one.

Pattern: Cable Peplum Pullover - free pattern by Lion Brand Yarn
Needles: 4.5 mm (Knitting a worsted weight pattern using DK yarn meant I had to go up a needle size to make gauge).
Yarn: Cleckheaton Country Naturals 8 Ply - colour 1839 Gold - I used 11 balls
Cost: $22 ($2 a ball on sale)

This was cast on 15th of Feb for COM. I began as I often do with a sleeve. Sleeves are a good place to start and also good large scale swatches to check gauge. Also the sleeves for this pattern are simple 2 by 2 rib. Train knitting powered through the bulk of the first sleeve really quickly. The momentum carried me through the second sleeve pretty promptly too.

This hibernated for the winter… The sheer number of stitches for the peplum section at the bottom was a little overwhelming. And the charts are very large but the individual stitches are shown really small. I almost need magnifying glasses to read some of this so it required patience to tackle the first par.

 

The back hit the needles in late September and flew off the needles in less than a week. I did find a small issue in my instructions for the Cable 4/4 RC - the needle needs to be held at the back of the work instead of the front as listed. But once I got this started, I was pleasantly surprised at how quick this was to knit. There is really only a cable row every 7 to 11 rows or so and the rest is just a few increases and rib.

The front also flew fairly quickly bar some very annoying chart problems with the neck shaping. The charts show the decreases a row too early. The written instructions were OK though so I followed these instead.

Despite the finished jumper looking like a narrow ribbed tube designed to fit a stick figure, it stretched out beautifully and hugs my figure like a gently fitting glove. The cables curve gently around the outside of my breasts and up to my shoulders and everything just sits and flows perfectly. I LOVE this! The children all told me it was few inches too short but after blocking it has relaxed a little and grown about an inch and a half in length and is now perfect.

I hereby declare this stash to sweater project a massive success! (Photo credits once again to the boy!)

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).

F is for Foxes

The all time most popular post on my blog is How to Wear a Dead Fox (up to about 70 hits a week). This was a collection of all the amazing handmade flat fox scarves I found when searching for material for a post about a fox scarf I'm creating.

I love foxes, and not just flat wearable ones. Here a a few of my favourite handmade foxes from out there on the incredible interwebs.

Handmade ones can be incredibly realistic: from fake taxidermy like this guy by Natasha Fadeeva.

Or they can be flat cartoon-like animals like this one from Sarah Carr

Or they can be incredible cute Like Foxy Loxy by Roman Sock. (Follow the link to purchase the pattern for this gorgeous amigurumi).

or Crafty Alien's Felted Fox (available as a kit and part of the original backyard creatures collection. There is also a crochet version).

And finally, Intrepid Fox By Ella Austin. He comes as a kit to make him with all the beautiful hand dyed wool. I have the pattern for him (but not the kit) and he's on my to do list.

You can decorate your house with fox cushions.
Here's Herbert and Friend's incredibly cute Flying Fox Cushion.

Or Donna Wilson's awesome knitted fox cushions.

Or this Sass and Peril Screen-printed and fox shaped cushion.

Or you can wear your fox as a handbag.
A Fox Felt bag from Kew Botanic gardens Shop

Or a Fox Back Pack by Skip Hop

Or a Fox Ipad Case made in felt by BoutiqueID (Isabelle Dansereau) in Canada. She also makes the same design to fit phones, kindles or laptop computers. Santa I want one! Hint, Hint!

Or you can wear your fox on a jumper / sweater / pullover (insert correct word deending on where in the world you're reading this). Here's just a really brief selection to get you started.
Mr Fox sweater by Hobbs UK

Or a Girl Fox Jumper by John Lewis

Aubin and Willis Portland Fox jumper

Foxy Jumper from Jay Jays.

Cos after all foxes are known to be smart, clever, wily and hard to catch. Here's my Gradu-Fox to finish off this post. To read all about him and his friends see A Menagerie of Gradu-animals