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).

The great Scarf-ghan unveiling....

In January 2014 my needles and I started on a journey of discovery. In March 2015 after thousands of stitches, miles of seaming, many adventures and delicious knitting experiences along the way, we called a halt. The great scarf / strip afghan experiment is finished and officially in use. Anyone got cable! is a finished object and a much loved family member. There are arguments about who gets to snuggle under in on the couch on in the recliner. It's actually rarely me (and I did knit it for myself...)

The lovely ladies in the Unofficial Women's Weekly Group on Ravelry are owed a giant hug for providing the motivation to create this beauty. We were encouraging each other to complete the various knitted afghans we were making. Many of us were doing variations on the classic, knit a square - make an afghan. However the sheer horror of the concept of all that sewing was a giant hurdle many were baulking at. So I thought, why not make strips instead of squares. Essentially I knit all my favourite cable and cable and lace scarves that caught my eye recently and sewed them up into a lap blanket for me. The genesis of the idea, the inspiration and the early stages of construction are described in more detail in this blog post (Anyone got cable! - A scarf-ghan).

This was a great strategy. There was a constant variety of patterns and yarn in little do-able chunks at a time. I didn't get bored in the middle of the process. Each scarf got a chance to tell its own story along the way. See also a series of scarves = afghan for the details of each scarf strip - e.g. patterns used. As a bonus most of them are free patterns.

On Good Friday we convinced the afghan to come and play in the Sunflowers and have its final beauty shots taken. The town I live in has two giant public art installations designed to brighten up some depressed and unused industrial areas of town. These photos were taken in a field that is a giant spiral maze of sunflowers. (You can read more about the project here - #getsunflowered).

I admit, I did wimp out of this without strictly finishing it completely. I haven't added a separate knitted edging. I toyed with both a sideways knitted garter stitch and an i-cord border (and had a go at both) but felt it didn't really need it enough to make me feel justified knitting it.

Here's the boy demonstrated how you can wrap yourself head to toe in the awesome snugness. He make the blanket look like a butterfly chrysalis.

I'd like to thank my children for frolicking in the sunflowers with me. I'm off to plan the next afghan adventure now. I don't think I quite have it out of my system. I might just snuggle here under my blanket while I knit the next one.

We knit you a Merry Christmas....

In December, the knitting needles tend to naturally turn to knitting ornaments. Even almost without conscious effort, I find myself wanting to knit little whimsies for my Christmas tree and to share with my family.

I spent the first week of December on the beautiful Australian Gold Coast having a much needed relaxing holiday. Sun, sand, surf, shopping, neon, amazing food and seven and a half thousand cheerleaders. (One of the main reasons we were there was to watch future doctor daughter shake her poms in the Open Australian title division as a prelude to Worlds next year #20swifteen).

Holidays mean holiday knitting, right? It's the best way to wind down and de-stress. If you are a knitter, you understand that the most agonizing part of holiday packing is deciding just what knitting to take with you on holidays. You've got to have enough for all your knitting moods. You need extra yarn, just in case you run out. You've got to remember to pack all the appropriate needles and stitch markers, scissors, sewing needles, the pattern, etc... You need more than one backup project in case it all goes wrong for you.

Holiday knitting also has to be portable. This time around, I decided to take two small knitting kits that had come with various English knitting magazines. Part of the impetus for this was knitting for Christmas with the delightful ladies in The Unofficial Women’s Weekly group who were running a CAL/KAL for November/December 2014

This first was a cute little reindeer kit that came with issue 105 of Knit Today. Supposedly everything needed, yarn, stuffing, embroidery thread, ribbon and the bell - just add needles. I love his little slip stitch texture. And he’s cute and small and Christmassy.

And then I ran out of yarn (and stuffing) not even a few days into the holiday! I knitted and stuffed two legs complete with their little separate hooves. I made the body and stuffed it with what I had left of the stuffing supplied in the kit but it’s not plump enough. I knitted the head and sewed up the ends. I made a tail…. and I had about 25 cm of yarn left….

 I don’t know what the issue is. I used the suggested needle size (2.75 mm). My tension checks out OKish… There’s just not enough yarn in the kit. I still had to make two arms and the hooves, two ears and two antlers. I’m pretty sure I have some similar brown acrylic in the stash. So I'll finish it when I got home. So much for this being holiday knitting. (That's why you take backup projects...)

Actually the brown acrylic, I was thinking of was in my mother’ stash. She has custody of all the cheap toy acrylic. She was happy to see me even if I was only there to steal wool…. I knitted the arms and paws and stuffed them. The colour is quite different but it looks OK after assembly. (It’s sufficiently symmetric). I knitted two ears and embroidered the face and tied on his bell. Voila!

The kids were quite uncomplimentary about the finished object - they decided it doesn’t look like a reindeer. They were calling it a dog / cow / minotaur thingy. (Minotaur? - too much fantasy reading going on around here).

Photos taken in Hosier Lane in Melbourne during the mad Christmas rush season. I love good graffiti laneways.

So it was onto the backup knitting plan. I turned to the other kit - a Christmas angel that was again a kit from Let's Knit Issue 73, November 2013. The pattern is called Gabriella by Amanda Berry. This one was knitted on 3.75mm needles. it's knitted flat and then seamed. I knitted the head and body bit. Then the holiday finished.

I knitted little bits of the angel here and there over the rest of December but had a small spot of procrastination in finishing up the face and the hair. Finally knuckled down and did it early in the morning on the 23rd of December. This one is part of my Mum's Christmas gift. I've been told the angel has a serene expression. I love the pop of gold in her hair and wings.

Last Christmas was the first year, we were missing a child for Christmas dinner. The middle daughter spent her Christmas in Padova in Italy with generous friends chasing the elusive white Christmas. It didn't snow for her but it was still an awesome experience. She bought me home Italian knitting magazines and a copy of Arne and Carlo's Knitted Christmas balls book (in Italian). Now I can read Italian (sort of). I studied it a high school but it is very rusty. However, once I brushed up on the Italian knitting terminology, I was fine with this. There are clear photo tutorials for stuffing and finishing and all the patterns are charted. Mel of course had an ulterior motive in buying me this book. She wants a collection of red and white baubles for her future tree. Of course I'll oblige. She keeps complaining about a distinct lack of Christmas markets in Australia.

I made a sample bauble using DK and 3.75mm Needles. It was an abject failure as a bauble. It was miles too large and there was insufficient contrast between the yarns I was using. (Probably a mistake to use a variegated yarn as one of them. It does, however, make a good cat toy / child's ball though). So we went to fingering weight yarn and 2.75 mm needles. Meet Running reindeer. Next I'm going to knit the Christmas goat. (See Gavlebokken).

And I made a gift tag for my sister's present. These little owls are a great effective use of tiny little scrappy bits of yarn. I did have a plan to make a heap of these for present tags. It didn't happen. Life intervened. But at least one present got special love.

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.

Curating Ravelry: Cowls

I started this post on the last day of the first month of winter and it is freezing. The wind is blowing off the Antarctic and it is wet and soggy and the wind puts ice in your bones. I've dragged the hand-knitted neck warming goodness out of the cupboard. So in honour of an Australian winter, today's Curating Ravelry post has a theme of  cowls - free patterns of course. I'm a fan of texture and lace and here you will finds cowls knitted at a range of yarn weights.

I'm starting with the iconic free cowl pattern; the Honey Cowl designed for Madelinetosh yarns. This is a clearly addictive pattern with 16015 cowls made so far. Many people can't just stop at one.

© madelinetosh

Honey Cowl by Antonia Shankland.

More gorgeous texture in a bulky yarn this time in herringbone stitch.

© Purl Soho

Big Herringbone Cowl by Purl Soho.

Or lacey and leafy. I love this idea of fastening a smaller cowl to fit to order with a gorgeous brooch or pin.

by emilyooo

A Noble Cowl by Emily Kausalik.


Want to knit a special project with your knitting BFF? The concept for this design was to create a knitted version of “best friend necklaces”. Here's the BFF cowl from Knitty! Interlocking links are knitted flat, then grafted together for all eternity.

© Marc Smollin

I made this one. But I cheated and was my own knitting BFF. (Slightly sad but a great fun knit). This is a worsted weight project.
BFF Cowl by Ysolda Teague & tiny owl knits.

Lace and ridges

A Grey Loop by Helen G.

Or simple, effective and unisex.

by westknits

Purl Ridge Scarf by Stephen West (Westknits).

A lacey cowl that's long enough to wrap around and around and nestle into in deepest winter weather.

by knittedblissJC

Stockholm Scarf by KnittedBlissJC.

Linen stitch in leftovers, bright and rainbow and a great stash-buster.

by LadyDanio

Manic Panic Cowl by Sarah Core.

Or lace and texture blended together in a reversible loop that you can just through around your neck without having to figure out which way is up.

© Galia Lael

Casu Cowl by Galia Lael

Gorgeous milanese lace. A long loop of airy scallops.

© stipa

Mialnese loop by Tante Ehm

An elegant lace funnel shaped cowl that frames the shoulders and is long enough to warm your neck without bulk.

by AudKnits

Eleanor Cowl by Audrey Knight

Simple unisex loops combining stocking stitch, garter and rib. Matching his and hers cowls anyone?

© Tin Can Knits

Oats by Tin Can Knits

This one is designed to showcase a variegated yarn without pooling and without the yarn overwhelming the pattern.

© Knitterchristy

Downtown Cowl by Christy Becker

Or maybe colour-work is your go? Tell your life story in a wearable cowl.

© POF

I did!
My Favorite Things Infinity Scarf by Jill McGee

Knitted chevrons in an elegant buttoned cowl.

by Meliabella

Pedestrian Crossing Cowl by Melissa Sibley

Crossed stitches produce a distinctive openwork pattern.

© Reiko Kuwamura

Elis by Reiko Kuwamura

Lace and cables make for an elegant and airy cowl.

by bellanordica

My Dolphin Cowl by kniTTina

I could go on and on and on and on. I've inspired myself to get out the needles, dive the stash and plan the next cowl. Hope you enjoy knitting a winter cowl too!