Made in Abyss Socks

Time seems to be behaving very strangely under lock-down.  It seems to be passing very slowly - nothing much is happening, the days blur into one another.  And then I find that it's seven weeks since I last wrote a blog post.

I said in that post that I had nearly finished a pair of socks, and that I would write about them when they were finished.  Well, I finished them a few weeks ago.  (I can't remember when. It was in April.)  Here's the post I said I would write.

To go back to the beginning. When the weather turned cold at the end of last year, I got interested in knitting socks again, purely to keep my feet warm.  And I saw on Ravelry the 'Made in Abyss' sock pattern by the Finnish designer Tiina Kuu.  I liked the look of them - they have a band of little trees (?) in stranded knitting just above the ankle.  (The design is named for a Japanese manga series about a girl and a robot exploring a fearsome Abyss, though I don't know whether the trees have anything to do with the manga.)  I hadn't knitted socks with stranded knitting before, and I though I'd like to try it,  and the heel construction looked really interesting.  (You have to be a really serious knitter to choose a sock pattern for its fascinating heel construction, I think.)

I finished my first pair of Made in Abyss socks in February.  They are in Lang Jawoll sock yarn, in Toffee and Light Grey.  (Tiina Kuu suggests using five gradient-dyed miniskeins, but I think they look equally good in two solid colours.) 

And here's a view of the heel:

The pattern has two options for the heel, one with a gusset at each side of the ankle, and the other with a single gusset at the back. I enjoyed knitting the socks,a nd I liked the end result, so I decided to knit another pair, to try the other heel option.

I made a few other tweaks for the second pair, too.  I did the cuff in double rib, because it's stretchier and I prefer that. I changed the rib section below the band of stranded knitting, so that every round is knit 4, purl 1. In the pattern, alternate rounds are all knit, but I wanted to make that part of the socks slightly more stretchy, too.  I changed the foot part, so that the rib pattern is continued all the way to the toe, because I preferred the look of that.  And finally, I did a spiral toe instead of a conventional toe with a grafted end because I hate grafting.  I did graft the toes on the first pair of socks, but I didn't make a very good job of it.  Really, I much prefer knitting socks toe-up, and it's partly to avoid grafting.   

So here's my second pair of Made in Abyss socks.

The colours are the same Light Grey as before, with Charcoal. I do prefer these to the first pair, just because of the changes I made to suit me, but I like both pairs a lot.

The Lang Jawoll is very nice wool - good to knit with, and it comes in a huge range of colours.  However, each ball has a spool of matching reinforcing thread in the middle.  The idea is that you can knit the heel and toe of your socks using the wool and the reinforcing thread together, so that the socks will last longer. This is supposed to be a bonus. I have tried using the reinforcing thread in an earlier pair of socks, though I decided that it's unnecessary and fiddly.  But even if you want to use it, I don't think you need as much as one spool for a pair of socks, and you get two. (A pair of socks takes two balls of Jawoll, and so you get two spools of reinforcing thread.)   It's wasteful, and the thread is wound onto a plastic bobbin - even if you have a use for all the thread, you're left with waste plastic. Regretfully, I shan't be buying Jawoll again, for that reason.

Roadside Beanie

I'm going to Shetland Wool Week at the end of September - the first time I've been to Wool Week, and the first time I've been to Shetland too.  It's especially exciting, because I'm part of the programme - I'm giving an evening talk on the Knitting & Crochet Guild and its collection.

Every year, there is a special Wool Week hat, with a free pattern, and the idea is to wear it then so that fellow knitters can recognise you.  This year's pattern (available here) is the Roadside Beanie, designed by the Wool Week patron Oliver Henry.  I started mine at the end of April, and finished the knitting months ago, but only blocked it and sewed in the ends last week.  I took it to the Huddersfield Guild meeting on Thursday for the show-and-tell session which we have at the start of every meeting, and a friend took a photo of it.

Here's another photo, posed on a mixing bowl, to show the band of sheep around it, and the corrugated rib:

Back in April, when I was planning my beanie, I looked through the suitable wool that I already had, and found these colours:

The three balls of Jamieson's Spindrift, in Chartreuse, Jade and Parma, I bought a few years ago, when a local yarn shop closed.  I didn't then have any plans for them, but they were a bargain. And now I have found a use for them.   The other five colours were left over from a pullover that I knitted for John more than 30 years ago.  He posed in it for the very first post in this blog, in 2010.

 The pullover is from Sarah Don's book, Fair Isle Knitting, which I bought in 1981.  I used the colours she suggested: moorit, cream, blue, rust, yellow and grey.  As far as I remember, I wrote to either Jamiesons or Jamieson and Smith, in Shetland, to order the wool.  (No online shopping back then, of course.)   When I was looking for wool for my beanie, I couldn't find any of the blue left over, and I didn't in the end use the rust.  Being a conventional sort of person, I did feel that the grass should be green(ish), the sky should be blue(ish), and the sheep should be a possible sheep colour.  I think it's worked out very well, and I particularly like the corrugated rib, with a moorit background and the ribs shading through parma, jade, chartreuse, yellow and cream.   I'm looking forward to wearing it for Wool Week.

A Cashmere Lace Scarf

I have just finished (well, actually a couple of weeks ago now) a beautiful scarf in Yarntelier Cashmere Lace.   

 I got the yarn from Louisa Harding's studio in the Byram Arcade in Huddersfield, along with the pattern.  The design is Olena, and it makes a scarf so light and airy that one 50g. ball of yarn makes a good sized scarf (mine is about 135cm. x 25cm.).  

Louisa intended the scarf to have beads in the lace for the first few pattern repeats at each end of the scarf:

But I'm not a beaded scarf sort of person, so I left those off.  I also didn't do the picot cast on, though I did try it - I couldn't make it look neat, so just did a regular cast on.

The lace pattern is really beautiful.  It's not one that I know, but could well supplant Print o' the Wave as my favourite lace stitch. 

I did a lot of the knitting in public, i.e. in the various knitting groups that I go to, but that wasn't a very good idea.  I made a few mistakes in the lace. the worst being near the beginning when I had to unravel about 15cm., which at that point was more than half of what I had already done.  I did think about leaving it, because I thought that no-one else would see the mistake, which is probably true. But I am very glad that corrected it, because now it's perfect.  I made a few more mistakes, but I made sure to check more often, so correcting them wasn't such a big deal. 

Louisa promised that washing the finished knit, to get the spinning oil out, would make a huge difference - the cashmere would 'bloom'.  And she was right - it felt quite soft while I was knitting it, but now it is delightful.  Very soft, warm, and light, and the colour is gorgeous too - not quite solid, a lovely grey-blue.  I love my scarf.

Vandyke Check Socks

I have been knitting a pair of socks for my sister - just finished them.  My New Year's knitting resolution was to knit both socks of a pair at the same time (to avoid mismatches, not to mention second sock syndrome), starting with this pair.  I tried knitting with two circular needles, but found it too awkward - too much cable to contend with - and so used magic loop with a single circular needle instead. 

The yarn is Regia Graphics Color sock wool.  My sister wanted a pair of socks to wear with her Joules printed rubber ankle boots - I haven't seen them, but here is the matching handbag.

I think the yarn is a pretty good match to the colours in the handbag, especially as I didn't go looking for it, but found it more or less by accident - after my knitting friend Cath Harris died, her family had a coffee morning in aid of the charity Myeloma UK to find homes for some of her extensive stash of wool and other craft materials, and I found it there.

I knitted the socks toe-up, using the same basic construction (German short-row heel, with a gusset) that I have been using recently, because I know it fits me very well. It turns out that my socks fit my sister very well too.

I didn't want to use a complicated design with this variegated yarn, so I chose the Vandyke Check stitch pattern from Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.  I have used it before - for the first pair of toe-up socks I ever knitted, made for my daughter in 2011.

The pattern really doesn't show up very well, but I do like the texture given by the blocks of knit and purl stitches, so I'm happy with the choice.

I hope you enjoy wearing your socks, Margaret.  I have enough yarn left to knit a pair of socks for me, too, but I think I'll have a break from socks for a while.

A Light as Air Scarf

I have just finished a lacy scarf that I started earlier this month - a very quick knit.   The yarn is brushed alpaca and silk, very soft and fluffy, and it's knitted on 6.5mm needles, so it grows fast.

(As in the post I wrote shortly after I started knitting, the photo looks hopelessly out of focus, but it isn't - the yarn is just very very fluffy.) 

The pattern is called Light as Air - designed by my friend Steph as a free pattern for this yarn (see her Etsy shop - Steph's Crafty Bits).  It's a very simple stitch pattern - two rows, and one of them is all purl.  All the decreases are left-leaning, so the fabric is slightly biassed, which is why the ends aren't square, but that doesn't matter in a scarf.  Steph designed it as a shorter narrower scarf, to be threaded through a knitted loop in the same yarn, that would take just one skein.  I've used two skeins, and the scarf is about 28cm. (11 ins.) wide and about 170cm. (67in.) long. It will be very warm and cosy to wear.

Now back to my Rosedale socks - I have finished the first, but I will have to remind myself all over again how to do Judy's Magic Cast On.

Perfectly Plain Socks

Last month,  I knitted myself a pair of socks, though I have only just today sewn in the ends.  It hasn't  been sock-wearing weather, but I got around to finishing them today so that I could take a photo.

They are perfectly plain stocking stitch.  I wanted to knit again the spiral toe and German short-row heel from the On the Other Foot pattern.  The spiral toe suits the shape of my foot (though I find the cast-on very tricky - I think  I should try the one I used for knitting pence jugs, except that I can't remember what it was called. I'll fill it in here when it's come back to me. [I looked it up - it's Emily Ocker's circular cast on.  You'll find tutorials on YouTube.])  And the heel is well-fitting and easy to do and altogether satisfying.  But I also needed some straightforward knitting, suitable for doing while listening to talks, not the cable and lace pattern of my original On the Other Foot socks.

Putting the toe and heel into a plain sock was just what I needed: I knitted the first sock at the Guild convention at the beginning of July, and the second sock at the In the Loop conference later in the month.  The yarn is Opal sock wool, in the colourway Geburtstagstorte (though it doesn't remind me of a birthday cake in any way).  I got both socks out of one ball, with quite a bit left over.  I didn't do anything to make sure that the paler stripes are in the same place on both socks - that just happened.  I'm really pleased that it did - I was prepared for mismatched socks, but wouldn't have been happy about it. 

They aren't very exciting, and I don't think that putting them on will fill my heart with joy.  But they fit well and will be warm and comfortable, so that's OK. 

On the other foot (3)

Since I last  wrote, we have been on holiday in Spain -  visiting Seville, Cordoba and Granada, and several other smaller places too.   We had a very good holiday, saw lots of historic sites (Roman and Moorish, mainly), ate lots of delicious food,...  But I had a few days of not feeling very well after we got back, so stayed in mostly, not eating much.  The weather was awful, so staying in wasn't much of a problem, and I did get quite a lot of knitting done.  The final part of the On the Other Foot socks Mystery Knit Along was published just before we went away, so I had the first sock to finish, and hadn't started the second sock.  And now they are finished.

I am very pleased with them - they fit very well and are the most luxurious socks I have ever worn (wool and silk!). Though I should maybe take a better photo on a lighter background.

 I did make a couple of modifications to the pattern.  The cables and lace option I chose for the ankle part had a few bobbles in it, but I have a strong aversion to knitting bobbles, and didn't like the idea of bobbles on my socks, so I left them off.  (Sorry, Ann and Sarah, but they are my socks.)   And the options for the cuff sounded interesting, but were quite narrow. I like a deeper stretchy cuff, so I knitted mine in a twisted rib instead. (My socks.)

I guessed that the lace and cables options I had chosen were those designed by Sarah, mainly because the socks I knitted for Susie for Christmas (described here) to Sarah's pattern The Chain featured one of the stitch patterns used in On the Other Foot.  But I saw Ann at the Huddersfield Knitting & Crochet Guild meeting last week, and she told me that I had actually chosen the options that she designed - the colour work options were those designed by Sarah.  You can see two pairs of socks, one using Ann's options and the other using Sarah's, on Ann's blog here.  The colour work socks look very good, too - and several of the projects on Ravelry have mixed the cables & lace options with the colour work options, and that also works well.

And just to prove that we have been to Spain, here's a photo of me looking in the window of a yarn shop in Seville.  (I didn't go in, though.)

 

A Cowl and a Pair of Socks

I haven't written for quite a while about what I've been knitting, but I have finished two things in January and February, so it's time to present them.

I haven't knitted many pairs of socks so far, but decided a while ago that maybe I should knit more of them, and I made a pair for my daughter for Christmas. I also decided that I ought to try wearing hand-knit socks myself, instead of knitting them just for other people. (Can't say yet how that's going to turn out.)

So I bought some sock yarn in November from Loop, in Camden Passage, for a pair of socks for me.  It's Lang Jawoll Sock Yarn, in Caramel.  The pattern is from Cat Bordhi's book, Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles (although actually I knitted my socks on one circular needle, using the magic loop method).  The pattern I chose has a design of Bavarian twisted stitches - I went to a workshop on Bavarian twisted stitches two years ago and have been looking for a suitable project to do more.

This was I think my 6th pair of socks (apart from a heelless spiral pair), and the previous pairs were knitted toe-up.  But this pair were knitted top-down.  That is the traditional way to knit socks, so I'm perhaps a bit backwards to start knitting top-down at this stage.  The heel shaping is also, I'm told, a traditional method, with a heel-flap, and a sort of triangular base to the heel.  I don't much like it, to be honest - the triangular piece doesn't seem very natural.  It's also the first time I have grafted the toes of socks.   They are very nice socks, but I think I'll go back to knitting socks toe-up in future. 

The other thing I have made since Christmas is a Moebius cowl.  I went to a workshop at the Guild Convention last July, led by Fiona Morris, and I've been intending to knit a Moebius cowl ever since.  I bought the yarn at the Knitting & Stitching Show last November - a discontinued Debbie Bliss super chunky yarn called Winter Garden, which is a surprising mix of llama, wool, silk and linen.  The colour is called Copper.

A Moebius strip is a surface with only one side and one edge.  You can make one from a strip of paper, and joining the two ends after putting a half-twist into the strip.  And you can knit a Moebius cowl in the same way - knit a rectangle, twist it and join the ends e.g. by grafting.  But it's much more satisfying to a knit a Moebius strip directly, with one side and one edge, and you can do that.  The cast on becomes embedded in the middle of the knitting, and isn't an edge - the only edge is created by the cast off.

  (I've posed it on an up-turned mixing bowl, in case you're wondering.)

Fiona suggested a diagonal rib as a possible stitch pattern that would work well.   It's a bit mind-boggling that if you keep knitting a diagonal rib, always going in the same direction, you get a cowl with a chevron pattern.

To repeat: the cast on is in the middle, between the ribs going in the opposite directions, and the cast-off edge is at the top and bottom, but is actually just one edge.  Best not to think about it too much.   

My Linen Drape Scarf

I mentioned in my last post that at the show-and-tell session at the Guild Convention 2 weeks ago, I showed the summer scarf knitted in Rowan Linen Drape that I started in April (described here).  I finished it just before the Convention.   

Here it is.  It does drape very well (as it should, given the name of the yarn).  I like the fact that even the stocking stitch stripes are slightly translucent.  And as I planned, it's an open pattern but not too fussy.   

If I've got time (hah!)  I'll write out a chart for the pattern and add it to this post.  And I'll try to take another photo with a better colour - the blue is less grey than in this photo.  

I haven't actually worn it yet - it's been too warm to want to wear a scarf.   But today is cold and damp - a raincoat and a scarf are needed, and it will get its first wearing.  

A Quick Baby Jacket

A couple of weeks ago, my sister asked me if I would knit something for a new baby - a friend's grandchild, who was then expected imminently. Margaret would have made something herself (she knitted something for the baby's older brother when he was born), but she's finding knitting too painful for her hands. So we got together in the knitting wool department of John Lewis, and chose a pattern and the wool, and I set to work on a baby jacket. And here it is:

Margaret wanted something that would be suitable for either a girl or a boy.  I wanted something quick to knit.  So we looked through the baby patterns for double knitting.

King Cole 3803

The pattern we chose has two versions of a jacket - one is supposedly for a baby girl (peplum, hood) and the other for a baby boy (no peplum, collar).  Margaret decided she would like a combination (peplum + collar), and  picked neutral colours (soft grey and ecru).  The yarn is Erika Knight for John Lewis Baby DK, machine washable wool.  (The baby's mother wanted natural fibres.)  Very soft, good to knit with.

I really dislike sewing up, so I knitted the body in the round up to the armholes, and knitted the sleeves in the round too.  I find it difficult to get seams in cuffs and welts to look neat, so they are best avoided.  I posted the jacket to Margaret earlier this week.  It had buttonholes but no buttons, as in the photo  - adding the buttons is her job.  And while I was knitting it, the baby arrived - it's a boy.

It's very satisfying to be able to knit an entire garment so quickly, and I think it's turned out rather well.  Eli will look very smart.

And the pattern leaflet is now in the Guild collection.  We need to keep up-to-date when we can.

PS June 2017.  I've just been sent a photo of Eli wearing his jacket - and it still fits him, though he started out big and has grown a lot.  So nice to see it being worn.

A Twined Knitting Cuff

I haven't written for a while - I just haven't been in the mood.  Sorry about that.

But I've been knitting, of course.  What I'm knitting at the moment is a birthday present, so I can't write about that.  I'll write instead about a couple of things I finished a little while ago that were practice pieces for a workshop I am doing next month on Swedish Twined Knitting.  I wanted to design something small that would show the techniques and a few different stitches.  Twined knitting is traditionally worked in the round (and I think is better done that way), but for people at the workshop who would prefer to knit flat I have devised a small sampler that might be construed as a coaster - I'll show that later, maybe.  And the smallest useful thing I could think of that's knitted in the round, and would show off the fact that twined knitting is dense and warm, is a cuff or wristlet.   So here's the one I've made:

In twined knitting, you knit with two strands of wool, alternating after every stitch.  My first practice pieces had both strands in the same colour, but for the cuff I was experimenting with two different colours. It's also, I've read, traditional to use a contrast colour for the cast-on, and then to make a braid with the cast-on ends rather than sewing them in, so I've done that too.

You can make patterns if you're knitting with two strands of the same colour with purl stitches on a stocking stitch background, and I tried that in my cuff.  Oddly, although the white purl bumps show up reasonably well on the grey/white background, grey purl bumps don't at all - having tried that, I unravelled it.

The inside is very neat, and shows how you always take one strand over another in the same direction, which gives twined knitting its thickness and stretch - and results in the two strands getting twisted (or twined) together, so that you have to keep stopping to untwine them.    

And here's a slightly strange shot of an upside-down cuff, showing the cast-on edge, with black yarn.

Do cuffs normally come in pairs? Perhaps they should, but I'd get a severe case of  'second sock syndrome' if I knitted another one of these.  I like it very much, but it was intended partly as an experiment to see what twined knitting looks like in two colours, and I don't want to repeat it.  But I have a good reason for only knitting one:  I have a sweater I bought this winter that I like very much, and a cuff (one cuff) is just the thing to go with it.      

It's an asymmetric design, with seams in odd places, and pieces knitted sideways, and you can see that the cable pattern on the front is asymmetric.  One sleeve is cabled, with a moss stitch top, and the other is in fisherman's rib with a stocking stitch top.   It's so asymmetric that one sleeve is longer than the other. (I'm not sure if that's intentional, but I've decided that it's a design feature.)  I've been wearing the longer sleeve turned up, to even them out - and now I can wear my one cuff on the other sleeve.


   

One Thing and Another

I finished sewing in the ends of yarn on my On the Other Hand mitts a couple of days ago, and pressed them.  I wore them today at Lee Mills - it was very cold downstairs in the store downstairs, and woolly mitts were very welcome.

Now that the Mystery Knit Along is finished, I know that I chose Sarah's design for the cuff, and Ann's design for the hand.  (But did my own thing for finger and thumb cuffs.)   I'm really pleased with them - while at the same time thinking that lots of the other pairs in the Knit Along turned out even better.  (You can see photos of many of the finished pairs in Ravelry.)  A lot of people reversed the colours for the second mitt, which looks stunning, or chose different options for the two mitts.  The Knit Along was altogether a lot of fun, working through the pattern, and watching what other knitters were doing with the pattern at the same time.

I have also just finished a cabled scarf.  The photos shows it just off the needles - I plan to press it to get the cables to open out a bit.  More on that later.

I used the same yarn for the scarf and the mitts - Wendy Merino 4-ply (fingering weight).  In fact, I used the same blue-green yarn for the mitts as for the scarf, because I miscalculated how much I would need for the scarf and was going to have some left over, and then chose the red (Rose) to go with it.  So now I have matching scarf and mitts.  The blue-green is called Pacific, though it reminds me more of conifers than sea.  It is very nice yarn, very soft, and Pacific is not completely solid, but is a mixture of blues and greens, with occasional surprising flecks of colours like bright emerald green and black.

Now I'm working on some small pieces in Swedish twined knitting for a workshop I'm doing next month - I'll report on progress later.

A Woven Stitch Cowl

I've been knitting a lot of neckwear lately - the Petal Cowl and the Seascape scarf.   Both of those were knitted in Louisa Harding's Amitola yarn, which is lovely, and I wanted to try the thicker version, Amitola Grande, which is about Aran thickness, and the same soft mix of wool and silk.  So I knitted another cowl in it last month - I was knitting it at Sheringham after I finished the Seascape scarf, and it was a quick knit.

I knew from a cowl that a friend had knitted in Amitolda Grande that it was likely to have very definite stripes, and I wanted a more blurry effect.  So I knitted it in woven stitch again, like the mitts I made before Christmas.   In that case, I chose woven stitch for its texture, but the effect of the slipped stitches on a variegated yarn is to avoid sharp changes of colour between rows, by mixing the colours together.  The effect is  really nice....

  ... and the other side is very presentable too.

I made the cowl quite small, and shaped towards the top - I didn't want to have too much loose fabric around my neck.  (It doesn't keep you warm and just gets in the way, is my opinion.)

I like it very much - I've been wearing it a lot.

This colourway of Amitola Grande is called Sleepy Hollow (525).  I usually like to know the names of yarn colours - they are often very evocative.  But Sleepy Hollow is a horror film, I never watch horror films, and I'm not very happy to think of a horror film when I look at my cowl.  (I have just watched the Sleepy Hollow trailer and the colours are very muted, with lots of browns and greys, so perhaps that's the reason for the name.)

Seascape Scarf

I said in my last post that I finished knitting a scarf at Sheringham. Here it is.

The pattern is the Spiral Staircase shawl by LizAnn Petch - a free pattern on Ravelry. On the smooth edge, you increase one stitch on every row, which creates a pretty edge, and the curve that you see in the finished scarf.

On the other edge, you cast off ten or so stitches at regular intervals, which controls the width of the scarf/shawl.  I wanted it to be a scarf, not a shawl, so I cast off a few more stitches in each step as I went along, so that the width doesn't increase as much as it does in the pattern.

The yarn is Louisa Harding's Amitola  (again - I finished Xandy Peters' Petal Cowl in the same yarn in December).  It's colourway 106, which is called Seascape. The North Sea, not the Mediterranean, evidently - the colours are quite muted.  And it didn't occur to me until I got to Sheringham that it was very appropriate to be knitting in a yarn called Seascape at the seaside.   Here's a view of the sea at Sheringham, on Sunday morning when the sun was shining:

The pale browny-grey colour in the scarf, between the two dark grey stripes, seems to me very characteristic of the North Sea.

The self-striping yarn works very well with the pattern - I like the way that the stripes curve across the width of the scarf.  I used one ball of Amitola, and the finished scarf goes right round my neck, with the two ends hanging in front.  It looks very good - you see diagonal stripes of the different colours of the yarn, and the zigzags around the edge.  (Yes, a photo would be a good idea.  But I'm trying to find a suitable pin to fasten the two ends together, rather than tying them, or just leaving them to hang - I might get a photo taken when I've found one.)   It's very soft and warm, too.   And I think I'm getting better at knitting garter stitch - I don't find it easy to keep the stitches even (stocking stitch is much easier) but this is better than previous attempts.

P.S. One of the blogs I follow is Orange Swan's The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done. Many of her posts review knitting magazines, and her comments on the designs are very perceptive, caustic when they need to be, and often very funny.  Sometimes I find myself laughing out loud, e.g at "Call me hidebound, but my rule is never to make any knitted garment that sleeps more than two" as a comment on a hugely voluminous top.   Worth reading.

Woven stitch mitts

Unlike some writers of knitting blogs, I don't make many knitted Christmas presents. (Too much pressure!)  But this year, I made a pair of fingerless mitts for my daughter - not quite in time for Christmas, but nearly.  Here they are.

I made her a pair a few years ago which she still wears (see here), but she keeps those 'for best' and wanted a pair that she could wear every day and not worry about.  She wanted a very dark purple, and I found just the right colour in Wendy Merino DK, which I use a lot.  It's called Sloe - the colour of sloe gin.

I knitted them in woven stitch, a slip-stitch pattern that does look like woven fabric on the right side. It has a four-row (or four-round) repeat.  If you are knitting in rounds, on an even number of stitches, it goes like this:

Rounds 1 & 3: Knit.
Round 2: (Knit 1, Slip 1 with yarn in front) to end.
Round 4: (Slip 1 with yarn in front, Knit 1) to end.  

It is somewhat similar to linen stitch, though much less dense.

  
The mitts fit well (we kept trying them on as I was knitting) and are reported to be very warm.

Petal Cowl

I wrote in November here that I had been browsing around for patterns like the flame stitch I had seen on a shawl in the Chanel to Westwood exhibition, and found Xandy Peters' Petal Cowl pattern. I finished it a while ago, so it's about time I wrote about it.

The pattern is designed to show off a self-striping yarn (4-ply), and Lydia at my local yarn shop in Huddersfield stocks some very nice ones.  I chose Louisa Harding's Amitola, a delectable wool/silk mix.  The colour is called Gothic, don't know why, and it's not turned out as stripy as I expected - it's more a blend of shades of grey and dark purple, with an occasional flash of red.  But never mind - I love the effect.

I reduced the diameter by a third.   This was my first attempt at a cowl and I thought I would feel more comfortable wearing something smaller. Also, the pattern tells you to cast on 300 stitches, increasing to 550, and I didn't feel up to tackling a complicated pattern over that many stitches.   So I reduced the starting number of stitches to 180.

I should also point out that I wear it upside down - the cast-on edge is at the top.  That's because I think it looks better with a red stripe close to the lower edge, rather than a lot of grey.  

It is a complicated pattern, and there were a couple of rows in the pattern repeat when I just had to plod through the instructions over and over.  But towards the end I felt I understood more what was going on.  It took me that long because I didn't do a test swatch - I decided that tension wasn't going to be that crucial, and knitting a test swatch in the round just to try out the pattern seemed like a waste of time.  I may have been wrong about that - it did feel when I had finished that really the whole cowl had been a test swatch, and I ought to knit it again now that I understand how it works.  And I must confess that there are a few mistakes in the knitting. Once or twice I purled a round instead of knitting, through misreading the pattern, and decided to live with it rather than going back.  (On reflection, it's ridiculous that the mistakes are on the plain rounds where you just knit every stitch, rather than on the really complicated rounds, where you have to keep counting stitches.)    

Now it's finished, I love it. It's warm, it's soft, the colours work really well with the design, the stitch pattern is absolutely fascinating.   I'm quite converted to wearing a cowl - I shall have to knit some more.   And it was, in spite of the trickiness of the stitch pattern, a quick knit - I finished it in two or three weeks.

I have thought about knitting Xandy Peters' Fox Paws pattern  ('recommended for the adventurous') as a follow up, but I'm not sure I'm feeling adventurous enough.  And I've read Yarn Harlot's blog posts about knitting Fox Paws, particularly this one, and I'm not sure I want to have to concentrate      that much on what I'm knitting. Not just now.

A Cosy Cushion

I wrote in October about a cushion cover I was knitting for my daughter, using a slip-stitch pattern.  I knitted a miniature trial version first, before starting the full-size one.  I knitted most of the patterned side on the KnitAway weekend in Blackpool, and now the whole thing is finished.

 

I've used a slip-stitch honey comb pattern.  Mary Thomas gave directions for it (under the name Honeycomb Slip Stitch) in her 1934 Book of Knitting Patterns, and it must be much older than that.  For the middle square of the cushion, I have used it wrong side out, because I think that side looks more interesting in two colours.

The outer border is done in the same stitch pattern, right side out.

I picked up stitches all round the centre square, and knitted in rounds until the square was big enough to fit the cushion.  Slip-stitch honeycomb lends itself to a neat mitre at the corners.

I cast off the square using an i-cord bind-off, so that it looks like piping around the edge of the cushion, and then picked up stitches along two sides to knit two stocking stitch flaps for the back. The buttonholes are not at all neat, I'm sorry to say, but as they are at the back of the cushion you can't see them, and they are very rarely going to be used.  So I don't care.

It's a very soft and cosy cushion, and my daughter likes it.  (She doesn't care about the button-holes either, or more likely hasn't noticed.)   And the colours look good as a contrast to the navy throw and grey-blue cushion on her sofa.  My own design, and I'm proud of it.