February 2015

You know if enough of us agreed to hibernate through the winter the rest of the world would just have to accept it and join in.

24/02/2015

Scratchy Solutions

It's been a bit of a stressful week so I've mostly been comfort knitting. For me, that means making something simple so I can watch the telly at the same time (not that I don't watch telly when I knit complicated things, I like a bit of background noise).

My garter stitch blanket is growing apace but the wool is still really scratchy. I've read up on some different fixes – such as soaking the wool in water with a splash of vinegar – but the one that appeals to me most has to be soaking the wool in lukewarm water with a squirt of hair-conditioner.

The logic seems pretty sound. Conditioner is designed to give people silky locks by smoothing the individual hairs. Technically it should do the same thing to wool, it's all similar stuff (sort of, maybe) anyway I'm giving it a go.

I knitted up a couple of test patches. Brown is going in vinegar, pink is getting conditionered.

15/02/2015

Stash Busting

Hello, I'm back with a new power source, hopefully it won't fizzle out on me again.

The past couple of weeks I've been alternating between working on my tiny bag-bags, my partially secret project and a new, big, knit that I don't really have time for but have started anyway.

My big knit was inspired by the craft challenges blog, which gives a prompt every month and then publishes responses. February's challenge is “Stash Busters... participants are to work on projects with material from their stashes.” As ODDknit.com is built entirely around the idea of using up scraps and oddments of yarn, it wouldn't be much of a challenge to do the same thing again. Instead I decided to stash bust another way, and make as much space as possible in my storage boxes. I'm knitting something big.

I have a lot of yarn that I've never even thought about using. Most of my friends/family/acquaintances know I knit, so when they want to clear out their own stashes, or have inherited a lot of unwanted yarn, it comes to me. Not all of that yarn is what I would have chosen (though I do appreciate it very much, I just don't usually knit things that are cable-weight or fluffy) so I piled up all the unused yarn I had. Looking through it there were some big heaps of cable-weight yarn, mostly in warm colours. I picked out the ones that went vaguely with my living room colour scheme (pink-red-purple gold-beige-brown), cast on 200sts and started knitting garter stitch stripes.

Each stripe is 14 rows wide and the colour order is truly random (I roll a die and everything). Sometimes the same colour comes up twice which is why there are double width stripes. Unfortunately each stripe also takes about an hour and a half to knit so I might not actually get it done in time to submit it! The blanket is very heavy and very warm, if currently a bit scratchy.

01/02/2015

Bag-Bags

Over the years I've bought quite a few fabric bags that fold up into their own little coordinated pouches (or bag-bags as I call them). Sometimes though, I just want a disposable bag on hand so I don't need to worry about it getting mucky or wet or having knitting needle holes poked in it.

That's why I've been knitting myself some attractive little pouches that will fit a plastic bag or two. The hardest thing has been choosing a stitch that is both dense enough and pretty enough to make a good container.

Not much else going on this week. I had planned to get some more work done towards my partially secret project (announcement coming soon!) but I've injured my thumb and complex knitting is more trouble than it's worth. Plus the power cord for my laptop has burned out again. It'll be days before my replacement cord arrives. I've only got an hour of charge left. This update is a race against time. The horror!