September 2014

03/10/2014

Posing for Pictures

I took many, many pictures today. First off I just piled everything up on a blank background, including the driftwood twig, bladderwrack seaweed and mermaid's purse that I'm not sure I mentioned knitting.

The display looked good in person but seems a bit crowded in the photo.

Next I piled up a selection of pieces with a greater pebble to interesting-bit ratio.

Finally I played around arranging things on my sand blanket.

30/09/2014

People Will Think I Can't Keep a Deadline

The big summer beach project final photography session (try saying that quickly) has been postponed until my day off on Friday. I need natural light for the pictures and, while I am glad that winter is coming, the earlier sunsets are plain unhelpful.

29/09/2014

The Inorganics

I've mentioned the pebbles before. I've done lots of pebbles now, but still somehow not enough. I tried knitting big pebbles on big needles with big wool but they didn't come out bigger enough to make a difference. I've decided to cheat and sit my pebbles on top of something.

Next comes the flotsam and jetsam, aka bits off boats.

Our local beach always has odd bits of rubbish in the strandline, and quite often those bits have fallen off the small fishing boats that live down the coast. It wouldn't feel like a proper beach scene to me if there weren't something man-made in it.

That's probably quite sad if I think about it.

I decided to make a couple of bits of rope and some netting. Just to be different I didn't knit them. It seemed a bit redundant to do knitted versions of things that are already made out of string.

One of the ropes I made by twisting and plying bits of yarn until it got thick enough to be called rope. The other I started the same way but as a final step I took some hints from the boy scout ropemaking page and tripled the strands before doing a “second spin” and “tugging to set”. The page suggests you need a friend to help (as it would), but I did just fine by holding things in my mouth when I ran out of hands. Of course if you want your rope to be longer than arms length you probably would need a minion.

The net I made by... er... tying knots in some yarn.

I'm sorry. I'm usually much better at researching these things and you'd think I would take the time to look up proper net tying procedure. I mean it's a handy post apocalyptic life skill to learn just in case. A quick google search shows I may have made an incorrectly knotted gill net. If I ever write up instructions I promise I'll research and do it properly.

28/09/2014

The Underneath

Time to build up my beach.

First you may have noticed that I uploaded a gold crown pattern last week. That was for talk like a pirate day (September 19th) but it's going to fit in with the beach theme too. I'm going to put the crown on the shelf below the pebbles, maybe get some other gold bits and pieces to be a collection of buried treasure.

Next level is the sand. This brings up one of the big projects I've been working on this summer... a sand blanket.

It's a sampler of different patterns made from knit and purl stitches. The borders between patterns are wobbly lines to replicate the sand waves on a beach. The whole thing won't fit on the shelf but I'm definitely using it to take some photos.

The blanket was a comparatively easy knit. There was only one moment that I had to down needles and make a cup of tea. That was when I realised I had gone wrong in a line of 8 stitches, 60 rows previously.

I was faced with either living with it (unthinkable), ripping out 60 rows of 200 stitches each (12000 stitches total), or purposefully dropping a stitch, allowing it to unravel back to the mistake, then re-weaving the silly thing back up to the needle.

I did this 8 times.

The whole time I was making a noise like a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a …

It was stressful.

07/09/2014

Big Finale

This will be the last month of my beach themed summer project.

Over the next few weeks I'll be taking some photos of my small beach themed display and writing up the little patterns I've still got floating around from it. It's a nice feeling to have made something more sizeable than usual, it's kept me knitting during the summer lull and next time I do a craft fair I'll have multiples of shells and stones to put in it.

On the down-side I've found it harder to think of things to write about on this site, I've been knitting lots of multiples without inventing as much, and the patterns I have done have been getting more obscure. If I do a project again it will probably be during the summer when I get less traffic and need more motivation to knit. In the meantime I'll go back to making whatever takes my fancy.