Comfort and Joy

I was slightly organised today and hung various scarves up in the porch to keep them from falling off hooks onto the soggy doormat. I had a moment of knitty joy admiring my work (excluding the gorgeous red pashmina - my brother brought that back from India). I love scarves!

Further to my last post on this blog all those months ago, I've been watching Kirstie's Homemade Christmas - aah, comfort telly! Inspired by that I'm having a go at a wreath tomorrow. Should be interesting. That's after icing the cake - I love doing that! I can't wait to see how it's turned out this year. It's based on a Sue Lawrence Christmas cake recipe but with a few tweaks - the omission of cinnamon, cloves and mixed peel because I loathe them (I replace the spices with extra ginger and the mixed peel with extra dried fruit), and swapping the brandy for whisky. I marzipanned it last night and the whisky fumes were delicious. *drool*

And later the boy and I will be baking 'cookies' of some description - the usual recipe we use is really more like a shortbread recipe rather than a chewy, gooey cookie but the book calls it a cookie so a cookie it is to him.

And, and, and... No, in fact most stuff that needs to be wrapped has been, the food shopping is done (we're low-key with the Christmas food) and all the cards that can be delivered have been delivered. Could it be that we're done? The frenzy is over?

Musings on learning new stuff

My latest joy is watching Kirstie's Homemade Home on 4oD (I missed it when it was on actual telly) with a cup of coffee and my knitting. I can't watch an episode tonight because my husband is watching a big pile of shit (points for recognizing the quote) and as my 'puter is in the living-room..

Anyway, last night I watched The One Where Among Other Things Kirstie Learned To Knit and it got me thinking about learning new things, how our preconceptions can make it difficult, how I like to learn things and how mystifying knitting must be to my husband.

Learning New Things

Watching Kirstie learn new things makes me want to learn new things. Maybe not blacksmithing - I've seen too many farriers at work not to be impressed by their work, but likewise too many not to have noticed how fiery and hot and frankly dangerous their work is. Maybe not so much for people who are less clumsy and short-sighted than me but those are not characteristics that go with hot metal and fire. Soldering silver is as scarey as I've ever tried or wanted to try. Stained glass looks fun though, patchwork I've been meaning to play around with, screen-printing looks good...

Preconceptions and Learning

One of Kirstie's comments was that a relative tried to teach her to knit when she was wee but gave up because Kirsty was left-handed. From this Kirsty was left with the impression that left-handers can't knit and so never had a go until making that programme. I'm right-handed but both my aunt and my granny tried to teach me to knit when I was little. They were both lefties, it didn't work! But I learned at primary school so that was okay.

However the downside of learning at school was that I'm not very confident of my knitting abilities, possibly because I hated it at school (the class was weekly torture as far as I was concerned) and possibly because I associate it with there being a right and a wrong way to do things. Therefore I'm unadventurous with knitting, reluctant to experiment. Oddly though with every other textiley thing I've tried - naalbinding, braiding of various types, crochet, weaving, sprang - I've worked from diagrams or written instructions (mainly things I've found online) and just had a go, not worrying about what was 'right' or 'wrong', just seeing what seems to work. Or not in the case of tablet weaving. I keep meaning to go back to that! But the point is I had a go.

It wasn't the teaching of knitting that was in any way at fault - looking back it's pretty impressive that Mrs Manson could take a bunch of largely disinterested eight-year-olds and teach us enough of the basics that we'd be tackling Fair Isle projects within two years. I think it's more to do with the way we learned anything at school at that point (and this may have changed with new teaching methods or it may be just the way primary-age children think) - it was all quite black and white, and experimentation although not actually discouraged was not really encouraged either. So it's only since I've taken up knitting more enthusiastically in recent years that I've learned new things. Things as mundane as other methods of casting on. I learned the long-tail cast-on so always used that, but it's so handy to know other ways. I'd never tried lace-knitting until last year, a full 30 years since I started knitting! It's partly having more interest now, but it's also down to consciously reminding myself to have a go.

Liking to learn new things

This is the positive side of what my mother has always referred to as my 'butterfly mind'. There's always something new to learn or try. The negative side of course is the number of unfinished objects in my various knitting bags!

The Mystifying Knitting

My Beloved is occasionally disparaging of my knitting, but more often when he comments it's with an air of being faintly impressed with it - it's something technical that he can't do or understand. Bear in mind that he's a Software Engineer, a programmer, a proper geek. He installs Linux on things for fun, then slags it off, all the while referring to it as Lunix. He reads xkcd and understands all the jokes. But he's impressed by two sticks (or one or four or five) and some yarn. He was even more impressed when I gave him a list, as requested, of Things I Might Like For My Birthday and he became aware of the technicalities of needle choice. This was prompted by KnitPro interchangeable circs - he asked about them and I started telling him about the various types of needle there are, the properties of different types of material in needles (metal vs. bamboo vs. plastic) and so forth. He looked both put out and impressed that I was a tech geek too, just in my own field. He is equally mystified by the fact that I can read music, and pick out the Iggle-Piggle song on the piano by ear. Funny old world innit?

To get back to Kirsty, seeing her struggle with the basics of knitting when she's so clearly competent and knowledgable in other fields was oddly reassuring to me. Compared with a complete novice I must seem fairly competent and confident - to non-knitters it must seem we have weird arcane (and pointless?) knowledge, possibly the reason my husband refers to my knitting group as the Coven.

So what shall I learn next?

Rescuing abandoned patterns and books

I may be alone in this, but I am completely and hopelessly sentimental about knitting patterns and books that are homeless. I saw two knitting books in a charity shop yesterday, glanced through them, thought 'hmm, not my kind of thing', went home empty-handed - then worried about their well-being and had to go back and get them today.

They're both rather '80s, one a Kaffe Fassett, the other a Sasha Kagan one - not designers I'm particularly keen on, I must confess. I know they're the great colour gurus but their designs have never really appealed to me, even though I can recognise they're doing interesting things with colour and pattern. However now I've got the books home, had a good look through and overcome my aversion to '80s hairstyles, the designs are starting to appeal to me - not as garments, but potentially as soft-furnishings. Quite a few designs would make very nice cushion covers, which would be fun winter knitting. So my hopeless sentimentality is not so bad!

I'm really quite taken with the section showing the colours used at the end of the Sasha Kagan book - it's attractive in itself, but also interesting to see the unexpected colours chosen.

Last week while mooching around the antiques/collectibles section at the Speyside Heather Centre, I found a pile of 1950s knitting magazines. I resisted most of them, primarily because they're machine knitting magazines, but I did buy two just for their historical interest. Jen, if you fancy these you're welcome to them now I've read them!

They even have the odd article on fashion which read oddly in a modern way - 'The Importance of Accessories' could almost have appeared in Red, until it states that 'a woman never looks well-dressed without gloves'! My mum, who remembers the '50s, flicked through the magazines and had a chuckle at that.

Aestlight continues

Apologies for the terrible picture - I keep meaning to photograph it in daylight when it actually looks Quite Nice, but only remembering after dark. The lighting isn't ideal in our house. So, this is my Aestlight - obviously I'm still on the soothing garter stitch triangle. I keep freaking myself out reading other people's project notes on Ravelry and so many talk about it being so quick to knit up! I've been so busy recently (holding the fort while my Beloved putt-putt-putts his way round Scotland) that I'm lucky if I manage a couple of rows a day.. Good thing I'm not in a hurry! I think I'm up to 105 stitches or so now. Counting stitches isn't my forte.

"Mama, my bwoken your knitting!"

Indeed she had.

The neat ball at the back is what it looked like before Miss Mouse got hold of it. She also pulled the needle out and I had to pick up about a squillion stitches.

Meanwhile I've done some colouring - an attempt to get my log-cabin panels to not have overlapping colours. I've done the four panels now and need to block them to the same size before sewing them together and then adding some strips at each end.

Soft things

On a trip in to Glasgow the other day, the siren call of the John Lewis yarn department proved strong. I fell in love with this Rowan Tapestry in 'Whirlpool'. The photograph doesn't really do justice to the subtlety of the colouring, which is like early-morning light on the sea. Oddly enough one reason I was in the yarn section was to find some suitable 4-ply for the Aestlight shawl which will be one of my next projects. The Tapestry is DK so that's not the yarn I'll be using, but obviously I had the dawn on my mind. In a happy coincidence, for some reason that shade of Tapestry was half-price, so I didn't need to feel any guilt about buying without a specific project in mind.

In fact I was buying using vouchers so I was also throughly self-indulgent in also buying a ball of Baby Alpaca, which is just so soft and squidgy. Really, shopping for yarn is such a multi-sensory pleasure :-).

In the meantime the log-cabin continues (slowly and in short stints, as I've had hayfever and the fluff on the yarn doesn't help my poor nose!). I spent some time yesterday drawing diagrams in an attempt to work out how I could arrange panels such as this so that I can make something bigger but not have colours overlapping, seeing as I only have three colours of the lopi. As an aside, isn't the 'yellow' yarn yummy? I keep thinking of mango sorbet when I look at it! I'm not an ice-cream person at all, but sorbet is a different matter entirely!

Log-cabin

Oooooh, I like this - it's fun.

I've been dipping in and out of Mason-Dixon Knitting, my favourite comfort-reading at the moment, and decided to have a go at log-cabin knitting. I like it a lot - it's simple and soothing but satisfyingly something-or-other (square probably). The yarn is some Sirdar Highlander Lopi, a long discontinued yarn I suspect. I've had it lying around for, um, years - I made some naalbinding socks using it (roughly copying the Coppergate sock) sometime last century in our more active re-enactment days.

Notice my mistake (the dotted line) on the first square - I couldn't remember the 'proper' way to pick up stitches so I did it my own way, resulting in it being back to front. Oh well :-).