It's Gift-A-Long time!

Would you like to join the Indie Design Gift-A-Long? It’s just begun, and the giant pattern sale is go! Over 300 designers are taking part this year, and there are giant searchable Ravelry bundles and Pinterest boards full of patterns for your browsing pleasure.

My own discounted patterns are collected here - they're 25% off with the coupon code giftalong2016, from now until the end of November.

This is the third year I've taken part in the Gift-A-Long, and this year I'm a moderator which is both fun and (so far) really busy. I’m co-hosting the Hand & Arm Things KAL and will also be on Prize Patrol once a week, handing out pattern coupons to people who post project photos at just the right time. ;) Come and join in if you're keen to start a new project!

Here are some of the GAL's stats, in a pretty graphic put together by our stats queen Kimberly Golynskiy:

I have my first project picked out, which is a pair of Grellow Love socks. I've dug out some leftovers and little scraps of Vintage Purls Sock and Knitsch Sock, so I can do crazy-coloured contrasting heels and toes...

Grellow Love by Claire Devine

My main project right now is a secret laceweight wrap, but I think I should have time to at least make some short socks as well. They can be my comparatively-straightforward project to work on in between bouts of lace knitting and GAL chatting. :)

Up for a crafting challenge?

Like any popular website with a big social element, Ravelry has its own traditions and special events. One of my favourites is the Ravellenic Games, held every two years to coincide with the winter or summer Olympics.

Ravellenics participants choose one or more projects that will be a personal challenge, and try to finish before the closing ceremony. The next Games are coming up in a few weeks beginning on the 5th of August, so if this sounds like fun you still have time to pick your projects. Joining a team is optional, but definitely adds to the fun in my opinion!

Last time around I crocheted a great big rainbow blanket:

I'm still super proud of it, and it's fantastic to have a real wool lap blanket in the lounge when it gets cold.

This time, I'm going to go big again and knit a Blank Canvas sweater. It's DK-weight, with 3/4 sleeves, and using a pattern I've knit before, so it shouldn't be impossible to finish in two-and-a-bit weeks (I hope). But it will still be a stretch for me, since I usually take ages to finish a garment. My plan is to halt all design-related knitting during the Games and concentrate on making myself a new comfy jersey. :)

Swatching ahead of time is encouraged (by analogy to 'training' for an event), so I've begun my quest to get my gauge correct. This is my first swatch in Madelinetosh Longrider DK, which I need to undo and knit again on smaller needles:

Wish me luck!

Slow Fashion III

This week's prompt:

Week 3, October 12-18: LOVED
proudest accomplishment / most loved item / most frequently worn item / thing you saved up for / investment pieces / thing you worked a long time on / oldest thing that’s still in rotation

My most frequently worn hand-knit garment is definitely my Blank Canvas jersey. I knit it back in 2013, and in winter I wear it a few times a week.
It's very soft and comforting (the yarn is a DK-weight cashmere from Colourmart), and the three-quarter sleeves are very practical since I'm generally doing stuff with my hands all day. Its simple design and plain dark brown colour make it a perfect wardrobe staple.

Me, my jersey, and my ride (October 2013)

In fact, I'm so happy with this jersey that I'm planning to knit the same pattern again! This time I'll use a 'busier' yarn, since this pattern can take it.

I ordered five skeins of Longrider DK in 'River Water' from Madelinetosh's recent sale, and the parcel arrived this morning (to much excitement). This yarn is a squishy, soft merino with 25% nylon for durability. I want this jersey to last a long time!

Don't you just love the speckles? 

Birthday Sale + Slow Fashion II

I'm having a pattern sale in my Ravelry store! On October 13th, all of my individual self-published patterns will be 20% off. Just use the code BDAYSALE20 at the Ravelry checkout.

I'm not sure yet how we'll be celebrating, but I'm leaning towards fish and chips at the beach. :)

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Now on to Slow Fashion October... this week I've been focusing on the 'handmade' part of the prompt:

Week 2, October 5-11: SMALL
handmade / living with less / quality over quantity / capsule wardrobe / indie fashion / small-batch makers / sustainability

I desperately need more lightweight, breezy summer tops, preferably sleeveless or with very short sleeves. Tshirts just don't cut it for an Australian summer! I also want to sew at least one long lightweight skirt with an elastic waist for maximum comfort.

I've been doing lots of research, and even ordering some supplies. I've gotten as far as ordering some fabric, and I've found a few indie patterns for the kinds of tops I want to wear: simple, fuss-free, and beginner-level (especially as I haven't sewn from patterns before). I'm most excited about Sew DIY's Lou Box Top, which includes different options for the neckline and hem. I also ordered a copy of Alabama Studio Sewing Patterns, which looks amazing.

I'm also hoping to replicate my home-made dinosaur top in a lighter fabric. I sewed the original three years ago and I still wear it regularly! It's held up to wear and washing a lot better than my shop-bought tshirts, which usually end up out-of-shape and shabby after a year or two - hooray for handmade. :)

Dino top + crochet-in-progress (Feb 2014)

Pattern sale alert!

Hey knitters and crochet peeps, the Gift-A-Long sale has now begun! 

Eleven of my patterns will be 25% off until the 21st of November, with the coupon code giftalong2014 on Ravelry:

• the Beeswax hat, cowl, and mitts,
• four of my Paper Hats - Paper Crown, Hearts, Planes, and Boat,
• the Bushwalk Beanie,
• Bubble & Squeak hat,
• Seaswell shawl, and
• Starstuff mitts. 

The list of all the participating designers is here, with links to their on-sale patterns (or if you like to browse on Pinterest, all the patterns are here).
Once you have your yarn and patterns, come and join the fun in the Indie Design Gift-A-Long group to share project photos and be in to win prizes.
The Gift-A-Long will run from now until the end of December.

I'll be joining the sweaters/cardigans/etc knit-a-long, with the Park Slope top by Laura Aylor. It should be a useful top for spring and autumn, and I have some really rich and beautiful Vintage Purls Sock yarn all wound into balls and ready to go. :)

If I have time, I also have my eye on the Fightin' Words mitts, and Findlinge shawl. The Wesley Bobs Christmas tree decorations also caught my eye, and as for the Persian Dreams blanket... just go take a look. Seriously.

It's Gift-A-Long time!

Hey crafting folks! If you plan to knit or crochet Christmas gifts and/or you want to make something special for yourself, there’s something exciting happening. A big group of indie knit and crochet designers have teamed up for the Indie Design Gift-A-Long on Ravelry, which will run from 13 November to 31 December 2014.

If you enjoy taking part in knit/crochet-alongs (KALs/CALs), there will be forum threads for each type of item (hats, shawls, mittens, etc), and heaps of prizes to be won - both physical prizes and pattern downloads. The idea is to kick-start our gift-knitting and have fun along the way.

If you need patterns, there will be a sale during the first week of the Gift-A-Long. The participating designers (all 293 of us) will each have a selection of our patterns discounted at 25% off. The sale period is 13-21 November. You can see my on-sale patterns collected here. 

All the details are over in the Gift-A-Long group.

One of our designers put together this graphic with some stats about the GAL (click to enlarge). Check out the "designers per capita" graph! ;)

Softness

I've been playing around with some really lovely yarns lately, super-soft and luxurious! I thought I'd tell you about them all at once. ;)

Two of the yarns have been knit into swatches for a secret project - a design submission to the knit magazine Twist Collective. It's my first submission to a publication, so it's been pretty exciting (and nerve-wracking)! I can't show you the swatches, but I can show you the fancy yarn: "ethical superfine merino" from Tasmania's White Gum Wool, and the merino/silk blend "Scrumptious" from Fyberspates, both in 4ply/fingering weight. The silk content in the aptly-named Scrumptious gives it a nice sheen, which helps highlight textured stitch patterns like moss stitch and garter stitch.

White Gum Wool 4ply, and Fyberspates Scrumptious 4ply

Next is a brand-new luxury yarn from New Zealand, which I just had to get my hands on: "Vanitas" from Outlaw Yarn. It's a DK-weight blend of alpaca and a little bit of merino. I love the design of the ball-band!

The colours are inspired by European 'vanitas' paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. A couple of examples (click to enlarge):

Philippe de Champaigne, Still-Life with a Skull, c.1671

Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas - Still Life with Bouquet and Skull, c.1642

Johann de Cordua, Vanité au buste, 1665

So you can see why this yarn appealed to me! I chose the colours 'Vanity' and 'Mahogany'. I'll probably turn them into a cowl and a hat. :)

Lastly, I managed to get my hands on some very special yarn through a bit of luck. I entered a contest on Instagram by posting a photo of a past-or-present knitting project using Zealana's yarn. I entered this photo of my 'Bushwalk Beanie' knit in their Kauri 4ply:

And I won! My very generous prize arrived last week - four balls of the cashmere/possum/silk blend Air laceweight, along with a book of patterns.

It's very, very soft and has Zealana's usual subtly-heathered look and slight halo from the possum fur. I think a striped scarf or shawl will really make the most of this yarn. :)

Temptation

I'm about halfway through the Stasis jersey I've been working on in dribs and drabs for months. It will be lovely when it's finished (fingers crossed), but right now it's at the endless-rounds-of-plain-stockingette stage. And true to form, I'm obsessing over what else I want to make soon! I love the choosing colours + yarn + other variables stage of a new project - Mum say it's the fun part, and I totally agree.

Here are a few of the patterns I'm dreaming of while I slog through my slow work-in-progress... :p

A new shawl design, suitable for homesick Wellingtonians (I want to make one in sky-blue):

Oriental Bay by Sue Schreuder

A cute sheepy cardigan (I'm mulling over various neutral shades):

Angry Sheep Cardigan by Pinneguri

A nice practical knitted top (in either golden or red sock yarn):

Park Slope by Laura Aylor

A graphic shawl (I have the perfect vermillion merino/silk yarn):

Antarktis by KallioKnits

And some cute wee bunnies for Easter:

Henry's Bunny by Sara Elizabeth Kellner

Rainbows over Ravelry

Coinciding with the Summer and Winter Olympics, it's a Ravelry tradition to craft something challenging while the games are on. Crafters enter the Ravellenic Games alone or in teams, competing against themselves to finish their project before the end of the closing ceremonies. This year, because the Winter Olympics are being held in Russia, many of us are crafting rainbow-themed projects to raise awareness and as a gentle protest against Russia's new anti-human-rights laws.

My plan is to make a big crocheted blanket, in concentric rounds alternating between rainbow colours and natural white wool. I'll arrange the rainbow colours in a gradient, splicing in each new colour as the previous one runs out:

Colour amounts not to scale!

I'm probably mad to attempt making a whole blanket in two weeks, but this is supposed to be a challenge, right? :)

The rainbow-coloured yarn is Prism Organic DK from Skeinz, mostly leftovers from making Rowan's Tetris scarf. The natural white is Norway 8ply from Morris & Sons.

The pattern I'll be using is the Op-Art Afghan Square, expanded to one giant square. I used the same pattern last year to make a tree-cosy for Yarn Corner's 'Royal Granny Parade' project. Sadly, many of our tree-cosies were removed by dastardly vandals before I could see them myself, including my one. Ah well, that's yarn bombing... I did get to see photos though! They're all on Facebook here and here.

This one's mine - thanks Bali for the photos. I hope my blankie will have better luck...

 

A tardy cardie

Knitting garments is time-consuming. I fall in love with cool new designs, and put them in my Ravelry queue, and ponder what yarn I might use and what colours would maximise the general awesomeness. But they take me so long to actually knit (in between working on smaller projects), I've made a total of two finished garments to date: a Beatnik jersey and my Chickadee cardie.

Therefore it's not really surprising that the Cria cardigan I started in September, in a big burst of knitting productivity at my parents' house, has gained only about a dozen rows since I've been in Australia. Luckily, I seem to have my garment-making gumption back, and I'm chipping away at my green Cria. On Sunday I brought it to Willie's sister's house, and knit a few rows while they played music in the next room. I couldn't resist trying it on the mannequin-on-stilts that looms in a corner of the lounge...

 

I still have the sleeves and most of the body to knit. I'm using 4ply pure wool yarn from Anna Gratton, which I bought at a Wellington market back in May - which illustrates just how long my 'garment cycle' is!

Naturally, I've been scheming about what cardie or jersey to make next, even though this one won't be finished for a while yet. I have two special batches of 4ply yarn in sufficient quantities, and a short-list of patterns for each. The first is Vintage Purls Sock in 'Hotel Magnifique', which is all crazy rainbows! It will need a relatively plain design - I'm considering Billowing, Barnsley, Deco, and Candelia. I'll have to work out which would suit me best, and what I'd most like to wear.

The second batch of hoarded garment-yarn is Skein Top Draw Sock in 'Golden', which looks like faded sunflowers. I think this yarn will be able to take a little more detail in the design. At the moment I'm torn between Praline, Conic, and the others I mentioned above. Because these skeins are underweight 'seconds', I'll need to calculate the necessary yardage carefully - the long-sleeved designs might be pushing it.

The plotting-and-scheming stage of a project is totally my favourite!

Experimenting with hemp

After all my plotting and planning for some suitably summery knitting, I ordered some hemp and cotton yarn from South Seas Knitting. It has now arrived in my hot little hands, mwahahahaaa...

Hemp for Knitting Allhemp3 (4ply) and Allhemp6 (8ply)

Habu Textiles Non Twist Cotton Boucle (2ply)

 
I have a cunning plan for the Habu cotton, but as I've used cotton yarn before on occasion, I was more excited about trying out the hemp!

I have it on good authority (thanks Mum) that hemp yarn softens up a lot after washing and wear, so I wasn't alarmed by the stiff rope-like texture of the Allhemp yarns. I gave the skeins a wash and let them dry, so that the yarn would be a bit softer and more pleasant to knit with. A word to the wise: unless you're washing a skein of yarn very gently, do tie some extra bits of scrap yarn around the skein to keep it tidy. I didn't bother, and the vigorous washing resulted in some pretty stubborn spaghetti monsters...

Now ready to get knitting, I got out my stitch dictionaries and played around with a few open, lacy stitch patterns. Two skeins of the 4ply hemp are going to become a scarf or shawl for Willie, so I tried striping some of the stitch patterns to see what happened.

The colours are 'Aubergine' and 'Chocolate' - an unlikely combo!

I like this 'knotted openwork' stitch with the two colours in play.

We'll need to do some more sketching and thinking, but narrowing down the stitch pattern choices is a good start. :)

The other 4ply skein of hemp will become a hair-tamer for me. I've been trying to come up with a stitch that looks like the black, bobbly seaweed that's common on New Zealand beaches. The colour of the yarn ('Licorice') reminded me of it, and it's a nice summery image. I'm having trouble getting the bobbly bits right, but I think I'm getting there. I still have a few permutations to work through, and I'll probably reduce the width too.

The 8ply hemp yarn, on the other hand, has already become a hat! It's nice and slouchy and airy, just what I was going for. It's also nice and simple. :)

A hat, not a mutant green jellyfish (honest)...

Oh look, a knitting post

Although I'm working on a laceweight merino scarf right now for a new design, my mind has been on summer knits of late, as the weather warms up...

Two of my knitted shawls made it into my reduced Melbourne wardrobe: my Bright Side, and my trusty black Damson. They've been very useful on windy days, but I suspect it will soon be too warm to wear wool around my neck! I like to have something to keep the wind and sun off (plus I just think shawls look cool), so I've been plotting to make a lacy lightweight shawl or two, and a light summer top.

Cotton, linen, and hemp are the classic fibres for summer knitting, and I've found some lovely cotton yarn at my LYS Morris & Sons, in a ton of pretty colours. I also have my eye on some Habu cotton and Hemp for Knitting yarn on the South Seas Knitting website. They're going on hiatus soon, so I'll have to get a move on and make my mind up! Holland Road has a gradient-dyed cotton I'd love to try, called Wolle's Yarn Creations. Also, Melbourne's Dairing stocks a lot of interesting fibres, including some blended with stainless steel. I definitely need to go and check them out.

There are some neat patterns out there for summer knits using these cooler fibres. Click the pics to go to their Ravelry pages...

Plover Summer Beach Shirt by Melissa Schaschwary

Gemini by Jane Richmond

Celine by Cecily Glowik MacDonald

Spearmint Tea by Kateryna Golovanova

Aethercopter by Jocelyn Tunney

I really want to make the Plover top and the Celine hat. They look like they would suit me and be really practical. As for shawls, I have a couple of design ideas sketched out, one for Willie and one for me. ;)

On the move

So, I'm moving. Willie has accepted a job in Melbourne (at a law firm), and he starts in early September. Whoa, we're moving overseas!

But first, we need to get rid of a ton of STUFF, and figure out what to take and what to put in storage of what remains. Luckily various relatives are keen to take some of our furniture. And Willie has a 'Planning' spreadsheet a mile long. ;)

I've been to Melbourne once, last year, and it seemed pretty cool. A bit like Wellington but bigger, and with better public transport and funny accents. I was impressed with the NGV gallery and wished I had longer there - guess now I will! And the state library was pretty fancy. We're not sure yet whether we want to rent an apartment in the central city, or a flat further out (maybe Fitzroy or Brunswick). Here's a pic of us being touristy on Brunswick St, home of the fun op-shops and eateries:

I need to find out which choirs etc would suit me - looks like there are plenty to choose from! And brush up on my audition skills, i.e. polish up some songs that show off what I can do, and keep practising sight-singing. Hopefully I can find a good teacher over there too. Robert's keen to "make the most of me" while I'm still here, so I'll be doing some more solos at St Mary's in the next couple of months. I'd better get practising...

Market Day Madness

This morning Willie and I went along to the Wellington Underground Market, which was having its annual 'Wonders of Wool' themed day. Willie was there in his capacity as second-opinion-giver, sanity-checker, and lunch buddy, and we had a blast!

First up, I located Frances' stall because I was keen to buy another spindle. It turns out she went to primary school with Willie briefly! Small world...

I tried a couple of different spindles, and ended up deciding on a little 'turkish' spindle, because it's a completely different type to my top-whorl. Should be interesting to learn how this one behaves, and how it affects my spinning. I also got a wooden wraps-per-inch gauge, which will be useful for measuring the thickness of my finished yarn (which I need to know for deciding what to knit from it). And the rainbow merino fibre totally had my name on it. ;)

Frances' online shop is Spindles By Sourkraut on Etsy - but you have to be quick to snap up a spindle, they always sell out fast.

Next, I found the Little Wool Co. corner, and picked up the two cones of 'Walnut' 4ply I've been hankering after for a Stasis Pullover, plus two skeins of 'Lime' for a Cria cardie. The skein of 'Amethyst' had to come home with me too - it's a really intense pink/purple that will be great for a scarf or shawl or little cardie...

Then it was time to sit down and have a cuppa and a bite to eat, before having a browse at the Holland Road Yarn Company's stand, which had lots of lovely imported brands I'd never seen before. I snagged a squishy skein of Three Irish Girls merino for the cabled hat I'm working on the design for, and I completely failed to resist a skein of Fyberspates silk/merino laceweight (the colour is 'Treacle Toffee', yum)! I think it might become a Barley Sugar cowl...

Tash also wrote out directions for getting to the HRYC's knit night via bus, but alas, it falls on Thursdays, which is choir night. But she's trying to get a Saturday morning group going too, which would suit me much better. I shall have to make an effort and head out there, to the wilds of Petone!