Woecakes

Teachers the world over bemoan the seeming inability of some of their students to fail to follow or, in some cases, even read the directions. Heh. Read on for a prime knitting example of why directions are important.

Way back in June, I started working on a sweater that I am DYING to be done with - I can't begin to explain how much I want to have this one off the needles and on my back, particularly when the mornings have a bit of a bite, and I need something to throw on for the school run. 

Well, things were going pretty well for a while (after the first ripping festival when I decided to change needles and knit it inside out, because (shudders) reverse stockinette dontcha know). But then the move happened, and I put it down and it was forgotten for quite a while.

About a week and a half ago I picked it up again - I had managed to get through the short rows for one sleeve, and once I figured out where the heck I was in the pattern, the second sleeve cruised along and I managed to seam them up and finally, FINALLY start on the body.

Now, a sweater in fingering weight yarn is, as I'm sure we'll all agree, a commitment. It's a labor of love, because it certainly isn't any kind of instant gratification project. So I was working away on the body, a few rows here, a few rows there. Last weekend we went to take the dog for a walk in Richmond Park, and I attempted to mortify my children by knitting and walking at the same time. With other people around! Imagine their horror*.

Yesterday Allison and I had a meet up at a coffee shop, and while I was waiting for her, I pulled out my Juniper and started working, hoping to get a few more rows done before she arrived and we had to talk shop.

After a while, I thought "Self, you've got your Kindle here**, and it might be a good idea to see how long the body needs to be." Which was thoroughly unnecessary, as the body certainly needs to be longer then the approximately 3 inches I had done, but anyway: I pulled out the Kindle and opened up the pattern.

I looked at the pattern. I looked at my knitting. I looked at the pattern again. I looked at my knitting again. And do you know what I saw?

Pretty red...

Actually, more important is what I didn't see.

Wait a minute...

What I didn't see were any decreases. Because in the pattern, you're supposed to work a set of decreases every few rows for waist shaping. And I, in my complete and utter daze of enthusiasm to get this thing done, had read through the sleeve directions and joining to work in the round for the body and NEGLECTED TO READ ANY FURTHER. 

Because I am an idiot. Knitters, don't be me. Learn from my bad example. Because otherwise,

You too may end up with a pile of red, fingering weight spaghetti, for the SECOND TIME*** in one project. Woe. Woe is me.

* Disappointingly, when I said to Devil "Is this weird that I'm walking and knitting?", she replied "Nope." Darn it!

** I am trying to both a) save paper and b) combat my tendency to print out a pattern, make lots of notes on it, and then promptly lose it by using electronic copies.

*** At least one time too many, if not two times. Bah!

GLYC 2014 recap

Well. It's now been just over a week since the 2014 edition of the Great London Yarn Crawl, and I think we're finally caught up on all the thank yous and updates that we've needed to do.

It was an amazing day. I went off in the morning to St. Margarets to meet up with a couple of the teams before they went to Mrs. Moon.

After sending off Teams Swaledale and Suffolk on their GLYC journey, i came home and finished packing up all the door prize goodies that needed to get to King's Cross. Then I went off into town to visit Wild & Woolly in Clapton. Somehow I managed to get absolutely no photos at all of this lovely little shop, but I did get some yarn...

Then it was a rapid shuffle back to The Parcel Yard to help get everything set up for the after party. It was absolutely incredible. I was stationed on the table for raffle tickets, with the prize basket prominently displayed. I wasn't really expecting too much in the way of knitted donations, because I hadn't seen much chatter on the boards, and, well, people are busy. Boy was I wrong!

My new yarn, taking in the view of the King's Cross platforms before the party starts. This is going to become something gorgeous and lacy and good for snuggling with on cold autumn mornings....

The above is only part of the knitted donated goods we collected. All together, GLYC participants knit 149 items for Refuge, and the event in total raised £812, almost three times the amount raised last year. Unbelievable!

Lots of other people have shared their thoughts and experiences on GLYC 2014 - if you check out the GLYC Media page, you should find links to lots of blog posts and podcasts.

Thank you again to so many people for making the event such a huge success: the shops, our sponsors, our fantastic and enthusiastic volunteers, and all of the participants who came out, hauled their cookies around London for an entire day, and still managed to have the energy to come have a drink and show off their goodies at the after party. We'll see you all next year!

Building a community

The second annual Great London Yarn Crawl kicks off tomorrow, and amidst all the chaos and last minute firefighting and excitement leading up to the day, I've been thinking about why Allison and I organise this brouhaha, and what it's come to mean to me.

When we started off, we decided that we wanted to create something that was about the community of knitters that we are a part of, and about trying to bring that community together for some real life interaction. I find that much of my interactions with other fiber/yarn people takes place online. God bless Ravelry, which has put millions of like-minded individuals in touch with each other all over the world, but it doesn't provide the same sort of connection that meeting up with people in the here and now. The GLYC is a way for people to come together and make new friends, find new shops to enjoy in the future, and discover new independent vendors and designers who have been so incredibly generous in their sponsorship (from left to right below: Kettle Yarn Co, Rock + Purl, Countess Ablaze, Artesano Yarns,  and Tin Can Knits).

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This year's GLYC has expanded from 6 routes to 8, added four new shops that we're really excited about, and has, once again, a vast pile of goodies to give away at the after party, this year sponsored by Pom Pom Quarterly. In fact, we have so many goodies that we've been able to pull together a Grand Prize basket to be given away tomorrow night in a raffle designed to raise even more funds for our charity partner, Refuge.

This year we also sold out the event, which means that over 100 eager knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers and sewists will be taking to the London streets tomorrow on a whirlwind adventure!

I've got a little contribution of my own to this community building event: my latest pattern is ready to be published today. This was originally submitted to the Unwind Brighton design contest, and I'm thrilled that it's finally ready to be released. Meet the Brighton Dome Socks.

Brighton Dome socks

To celebrate the release of the pattern (finally!) and tomorrow's GLYC extravaganza, I'm going to give this pattern away for free from now until midnight tomorrow, 20 September 2014. Simply go to the Ravelry pattern page, add the pattern to your cart, and put "GLYC2014" in the coupon code box - voila! Free sock pattern!

Please note: this offer will end automatically at midnight on 20 September, so don't forget! And if you're on the Yarn Crawl tomorrow, pick up some lovely high twist sock yarn to knit these babies up for the coming cold weather.

I'm looking forward to an exhausting and exhilarating day tomorrow, and to enjoying some time with my community. See you there?

Welcome September

I adore this time of year. I suppose it's likely true for lots of people who knit/spin/weave/craft with wool, but the start of September means some very specific things for me: 1) the start of school (only one more day of holiday to go, not that I'm counting it down or anything like that); 2) a bite to the air that makes me think of wood fires and snuggling into wool sweaters and scarves and hats while the leaves blow on the autumn wind; 3) apple cider donuts (sadly not to be found in the UK, as far as I've been able to discover).

We've settled in to our new digs fairly well by this point. My studio, while being somewhat crowded by the vast piles of stuff that are amassing for the Great London Yarn Crawl, has sorted itself out into its usual state of disarray (there are towering piles around the computer on my desk, for instance, and bags of fleece waiting to be washed piled under the workbench, bits of yarn are strewn everywhere). The important thing is that I know where things are. Really I do...

So much GLYC stuff. So, so much.

Spinning nook

I've managed to set up my spinning wheel it's it proper spot, however, and the result has been a whirlwind of spinning. On of my (sadly failed) Tour de Fleece goals was to time how long it takes me to make a handspun woven scarf, from fiber to FO. So over the course of the last three weeks, I've been timing my spinning of various fiber types.

From left to right: Southern Cross FIber South African Merino/Corriedale in "Buccaneer", Hello Yarn BFL in "Scorch" and Hello Yarn Panda in "Villain"

Unwashed, so somewhat mangy looking.

All of these were spun as 2-ply yarns at my default single wpi. The really interesting thing to me is that my production speed varied depending on the fiber type. The fastest singles were from the SA Merino/Corriedale (4.15 yds/min), with the Panda next (3.75 yds/min) and the BFL the slowest (3.5 yds/min). Plying was less variable, ranging between 3.75 and 4 yds/min. 

My other motivation behind this timing experiment is that having all my stash in one room and visible has brought home the hard reality that I have more handspun yarn then I will ever use, and it needs to go to new homes. So I'm setting up to sell handspun over at Porpoise Fur, and the big question to be answered is How much will it cost? I'm very aware of the issues in pricing handmade goods, and trying to find the balance between what the market will bear and what is a reasonable compensation for time and skill put in to making the product. So all these variations in timing are very interesting from that perspective - stay tuned over at the Porpoise Fur blog for more details in the next few days.

The other result of sitting in a room full of yarn has been much knitting! I've knit two shawls in the last couple of weeks, finished off a languishing pair of socks, and started a Tiny Tea Leaves Cardigan for Boo (Devil's will follow shortly). My design brain is going bonkers too, and I've cast on a new shawl design that is flying along...whee!

So what's on your needles with the advent of the new season?

The Creative Blog Hop

This is the first one of these I've ever participated in, so thanks to Jacqui at Happymaking Designs for including me! She tagged me last week in her post, which I really enjoyed reading. It's always interesting to get a view into other's creative process and how they work. So welcome to anyone finding their way here from her site - I'm glad to have you for a visit!

Here are the blog hop questions:

1. What am I working on?
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
3. Why do I write/create what I do?
4. How does my writing/creating process work?

As I thought about these questions, I realised that my wooly creative life is inextricably linked with other parts of my life, so there's going to be more in here then just yarn. Consider yourselves warned...

What I'm working on:

Under normal circumstances, I knit, spin, crochet (some), weave (occasionally) and dye fiber. I also work part time as a biomedical research scientist. I started technical editing for knitting designers in May of this year, and am in the process of trying to do more scientific editing/writing as I get less enthusiastic about lab work. I'm on Ravelry as porpoise and my Rav designer page is here. You can find my handdyed fibers at Porpoise Fur.

It's been a crazy few months for my family. We moved to the UK from the States just over five years ago, as expats with my husband's company. At the beginning of April, the company said "We're sending you back to Houston at the end of July." This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but Himself and I are both from New England, and experienced more culture shock with moving to Texas in 2002 then in moving to the UK. So we spent a few weeks dithering about what to do, decided to stay in the UK indefinitely, and have spent the intervening weeks finding a new place to live, finishing the school year and sorting out new schools for the autumn, going on a long-planned and eagerly anticipated holiday to Norway, and packing up the house and moving. We haven't moved far, but it is still a huge drain on everyone's energies. My creative energy has been otherwise directed, not surprisingly. Our trip to Norway did give me huge inspiration on both the dyeing and knitting fronts - I came back full of ideas for new colorways and new projects (in some instances, with the same inspiration for both). Now the challenge is to get everything sorted out so I can get back to work on those ideas and get them out into reality.

The other thing I'm currently spending a lot of energy on is the Great London Yarn Crawl, of which I am one of the co-organisers. This event is a one-day stash enhancement extravaganza, happening this year on 20th September, where nine teams of yarn lovers visit four London yarn or haberdashery shops over the course of the day, ending with an after-party sponsored by Pom Pom Quarterly. It's happening in just over six weeks, so we are frantically trying to get everything sorted out for the big day.

How my work differs from others:

On the design side of things: as Jacqui said, this is a really tough question! The number of ways to knit a sweater or a sock are, let's be honest, not infinite. I think what can be strikingly different is how the designer got from inspiration to final piece. I find that a lot of my inspiration for knitwear design comes from structural examples - I've designed hats and mittens inspired by London sky scrapers, a stole that mimics pierced stone screens found at Moghul palaces in India, and socks that were inspired by the tiles of a swimming pool. I also am inspired by nature, and particularly by water. I love designing with textured stitch patterns; the process of trying to re-vision an architectural element or a waterfall in knitted fabric is more fun then should be legal.

On the dyeing side of things: my colorways all have a story behind them, whether its how cells divide, a number that shows up in art across the ages, or an inspiration that hits closer to home. I usually have an image in mind before I create a new colorway, and my dyeing process owes a huge debt to my lab background - every little detail gets written down so it can be successfully repeated as needed on different fiber bases.

Why I write/create:

Because I'd be a miserable pathetic ball if I didn't. Really and truly miserable.

It is a bit strange to think that there are strong similarities between scientific research and knitting design, but I find the skills needed for writing a scientific grant or an academic paper can also be applied to writing a knitting pattern or a technique tutorial. I find the challenge of writing a clear, easy to follow pattern really fun. This may be why I have found tech editing to be such a rewarding experience. I also find the puzzle solving process (of both science and designing) to be endlessly entertaining, just on its own. As well as requiring the same kind of out-of-the-box creative thinking. 

Dyeing is a never ending experiment: if I put this much dye on this fiber and heat it this way, what happens? The fact that other people seem to like the results, and go on to make beautiful things with them is the ultimate in gratification.

How my writing/creating process works:

London Slouch photographed by the London Eye.

I've talked a little bit about this already, but let's take an example - the London Slouch hat. My "real" work is located near Waterloo Station, so every time I go to the lab from southwest London, where I live, I get to pass by the London Eye. One day I was daydreaming on the train, noodling about with ideas for a hat collection inspired by different cities (which became Travelling Hats), and was struck by the silhouette of the Eye against the sky - round cars at the end of long straight spines, wheeling across the skyline. The circular yarn over motifs around the hat were derived from a pattern in one of Barbara Walker's stitch dictionaries, and they are linked to each other over the crown of the hat by columns of twisted knit stitches, which mimic the spokes of the London Eye.

Thanks so much for coming to visit and read my babblings! To share the love, I'm going to tag my BKFF and GLYC Partner-in-Crime, Allison, at Champagne and Qiviut, and the fabulous Linda of Kettle Yarn Co. Alli is a thoroughly enthusiastic knitter, throwing herself at any and all projects with contagious enthusiasm, and is a fabulous resource in the world of marketing and social media - I'm looking forward to reading her thoughts on these questions. Linda creates the most gloriously rich and inviting colorways for her yarns, and I'm sure she'll have something new and exciting up her sleeve. 

Thanks again to Jacqui for tagging me, thank you for coming by to visit, and go check out my tag-ees - they are fabulous!