At last Blogger has allowed me to upload some photos. I have been trying since yesterday. I’m still not sure what the secret is.

Anyway, we have tiles now! This is the view on Friday night:

and a close up of the sock with one of the tiles:
There is no grout yet and there are still some gaps in the tiling but it is coming along.

The sock is coming along too, I am nearly at the heel. Here is a close up of the pattern on the leg, apologies for the lumpiness but the pattern shows up best when slightly stretched and it was easier to photograph on my hand than on my leg!
The pattern actually isn’t a proper cable it is a pair of twisted stitches one after the other separated by a plain round. I am enjoying doing it but the yarn (Alpaca blend sock yarn from Alpaca Plus ) is thicker than the sock yarn I am used to using and the fabric produced is practically bullet proof! The fact that this yarn is thicker also means that there are fewer metres in a skein which I discovered after knitting the first sock (a beige one which I don’t think I have photographed) and weighed it to discover it weighed 65g and there is no way I can make a pair out of 100g. I have three different colours with 100g of each so I am making a pair with green legs and blue feet, and then there is the lone beige one and I am going to make the pair for it a multi-coloured sock using up the left overs. The other problem with trying to do twisted stitches with this yarn is that I have snapped the tip off my Brittany birch sock needles twice now, I snapped the second one last night. Luckily it is just the tip though so I could just sand paper it and carry on.

m mentioned in the comments for the last post about doubling the ridiculously fine yarn. Would this work ok for lace? I haven’t much experience of knitting lace and although I have happily used several threads knit together on a firmer fabric I don’t know whether this would work on something so open as lace. Talking of lace knitting, what needles do people recommend? I think this yarn is going to require some pretty small needles. The smallest circulars I have are 2mm and are Inox I think, I see on the KCG Trading website that both Addi and Prym make a 1.5mm circular and am considering one of these. I have some 1.5mm dpns so thought I might do some experimenting with them so see if I can create a fabric I like before I dash off buying all different sizes of circular needles.

I’m not sure I will get to the swatching today, this weekend we have been painting the bathroom ceiling. We did the sealing coat on the new plaster yesterday and the first of the proper coats of paint. We are going to do the final coat today and then go down to my sister’s house for a much needed shower! We went there yesterday too and it is so nice to be clean and not to have to do the strange contortions needed to wash my hair in the kitchen sink.

The sock has been hard at work again. So hard in fact that I finished the first sock and started the second. Here is the new sock with the new bath!

Installed but not plumbed in, this was the view last night.

And here is an exhausted sock admiring the new floor:
I’ll ask the sock what its availability is for DIY in other people’s houses Daisy !

While the sock (with the aid of the plumbers) was hard at work yesterday I had a nice little trip to Fibre Crafts , the official excuse being my Mum’s birthday today and I was trying to find her something. They didn’t have the book she was looking for (Knitting Nature by Norah Gaughan) so I bought it from Amazon but I did treat myself to 3 books. Heirloom Knitting by Sharon Miller, Folk Shawls by Cheryl Oberle, and Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls by Martha Waterman. I have this hankering to knit a shawl, to knit lace, and to knit something ludicrously complicated, I’m not sure yet whether these three things will manifest themselves in the same piece of knitting or not.

As well as the books I gave in and bought a skein of Shantung silk yarn , the colour is Gentian I think and is the most fabulous colour ever.

I have been eyeing this yarn every time I go to Fibre Crafts for years, it feels lovely and comes in the most beautiful colours. The one downside is it is ridiculously fine. For scale, the knitting needle in the photographs is a 1.5mm dpn.
I think it may have been a moment of insanity which persuaded me that knitting with this would be a good idea. I shall give it a go though, it will keep me busy for a nice long time 🙂

There has been progress on all fronts here. This is how the bathroom looked last night, with the sock in progress reclining on the windowsill:
All the interior has now been taken out, and although you can’t see it the ceiling has been replastered.
As you can see the sock has been progressing well too! I am hoping finish this one and cast on for its mate soon.

This is some more catching up with things I have been doing but haven’t got round to blogging about.

At the April meeting of our knitting group the theme was knitting with beads. We had a go at four different methods of incorporating beads into our knitting, these were all methods which required you to thread your beads onto your yarn first.

Here is the sample I produced, the yarn is Size 8 perle cotton, and the beads are No. 11, or at least I think that is what they are. These were some pre-strung beads I had left over from knitted beaded baubles I made a few years ago so I am not entirely sure what they are as I haven’t got the ball band for the yarn or the bag for the beads any more.

The first two zigzags on the sample show slip stitch beading. This is when, on a knit row you stop just before the stitch you want your bead to be in front of, then you bring your yarn forward, slip the stitch purlwise, then push a bead up the yarn so that is sits in front of the slipped stitch, and then bring the yarn back and continue knitting as usual. You can do the same thing on a purl row but then you will bring the yarn to the back to place the stitch, and forward again to continue purling.

The difference between the two zigzags is that for the first one the beads were all added on the knit rows and on the second one the beads are all added on the purl rows. I think you could probably do a mixture of the two which would be quite interesting but you do have to be careful about getting the beads too close together or they wont lie flat.

The U shaped sample is adding the beads between the stitches on garter stitch. There are no slip stitches here, and the beads appear on the side away from you when you are adding them. To place a bead between two stitches you simply knit to the appropriate point, slip a bead up the thread so that it sits right next to the stitch you have just knitted, then you knit the next stitch, anchoring the bead in place. This is the same method used for the knitted baubles and also for the Victorian bead purses I have seen. If you add beads on all rows you get a reversible fabric. For this sample however I decided to only bead on one side so every alternate row is just plain knit. You can create interesting shaping by having more beads between each stitch.

Finally the rather pathetic line of beads at the top of the sample is my attempt at close beading, this is bead knitting rather than beaded knitting (which the other methods are types of) and the bead actually sits on the stitch rather than in front of it in the slipped stitch method, or between stitches in the garter stitch method. I found it incredibly hard to get the bead to go through the stitch, probably because I knit quite tightly, close beading I feel is not for me.

After the workshop I was inspired to have a go at a bracelet, partially inspired also by one that Janine had made although I wanted something a bit narrower, and I wanted to experiment with increasing the number of beads between stitches more gradually. Here are the results:

It is surprisingly difficult to photograph your own wrist! I think I probably should have waited for Paul to come home so that I could borrow him and his superior photographic skills 🙂

Edited to include a slightly better photograph of the bracelet laid flat.

Here is the fastening, using a rather nice button I found in John Lewis.
Although I failed to take a picture of the other side it is actually reversible. This is using the garter stitch beading between the stitches method, and increasing and then decreasing the number of beads between the stitches. This gives a shaped bracelet even though every row has the same number of knit stitches in it. If anyone is interested in the pattern let me know and I’ll write it up and put it on the blog.

Well it turns out Brian the plumber had been trying to ring us all weekend to tell us that his previous job has over-run and he can’t start on our bathroom today, but unfortunately he had a mistake in the phone number he had for us. So he might be starting tomorrow afternoon, or failing that Wednesday. Oh well, at least I get another couple of days of being able to have a shower this week.

Here is the sock in progress saying goodbye to our bathroom. At 8am tomorrow morning Brian the plumber will be arriving to rip it out and replace it. You can see why.
The sock is actually green, although due to my appalling photography you can’t actually tell that.

Off for an early night now so we can be up bright and early to remove the last few bits before it is all demolished. I am so looking forward to a new bathroom.

I was hoping to post this earlier but couldn’t get Blogger to upload the pictures. Anyway, here is it now.

Last Wednesday at knitting group Mary brought along some dolls clothes she has been making and we had a go at the colour pattern she had been using.

Apologies for the horrid colour choice, this was what happened to be in my knitting bag at the time.
The pattern is actually really easy since it only has two rows, the first row you work a repeat of p3, sl1 purlwise with yarn in back, then the second row you knit while slipping the slipped stitches purlwise with the yarn at the back again (you do need some kind of selvedge stitch on this repeat). Rows 3 and 4 are the same but the stitch you are now slipping is the centre one of the three plain ones from rows 1 and 2. You change colour for each pair of rows. Being a slip stitch pattern, the colours blend and it doesn’t look starkly stripey but you only ever knit with one colour at a time. It is a kind of pattern which is actually very restful and has a nice rhythm to it once you get going. It looks better from a distance, and it was interesting to see the colour choices people were using. You got quite a different effect with three very similar colours, to three very contrasting colours. It looked very nice as Mary had done using two colours which were close together and the third was a contrast. I think I will have a bit more of play with this.

After knitting group my Mum and I went to investigate the new knitting shop in Farnham, called Interknit Cafe, it is at 60 Downing Street, round the corner from the central car park. She had only been open a week and only had about a third of her stock so far but it looked very promising. I have signed up to her newsletter and am looking forward to hearing when she gets more stock in.

I did manage to buy 7 balls of Sirdar mercerised cotton DK in navy. This is beautifully soft stuff and I thought would make a lovely summer top of some kind. She only had 7 balls but luckily they were all the same dye lot so I bought the lot. I’m not sure if that will be enough for a top for me but I do have lots of bits and pieces of DK cotton lying around so I’m sure I can think of some way of eeking it out.

I’ve been having a very good week stash enhancement wise. I think I need to work on being able to knit the yarn up as fast as I can buy it though!

To help me in this endeavor Miriam (she of the Icarus shawl in Interweave Knits) is having a pattern sale, which ends today. I bought the patterns for the Mountain Peaks Shawl and the Lightweight Mountain Peaks Shawl. This download-a-pattern lark is good for the instant gratification too 🙂

This lovely parcel arrived the other day.

Sock yarn from Curious Yarns , from left to right the colours are: Sloe, Deep, and Admiral. It feels lovely too, not very soft but not at all harsh. They sent me two little stitch markers too with my order which was very nice of them.

And last but not least, so that I can be organised as I disappear under the ever growing mountain of yarn, a circular needle holder from Stitches Market, the people behind Knitter’s magazine.
And this is the inside.

The plastic wallets are all quite large, easily big enough to fit several circular needles in, and have a re-sealable end at the bottom. I am going to have a fun afternoon sorting out all my circular needles and organising them into this holder.

Finally the long awaited thoughts on the workshop I went to with Horst Schulz. I’m not sure they will live up to the expectations after all that!

On 6th April me and my Mum went on a one day workshop in Marlow with Horst Schulz. It was the first workshop we had ever done with him before though I had heard him speak at the Design for Knitting day at the V & A a couple of years ago, and we had a chat to him at the Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace a few years ago too.

He was very organised and the workshop was very interesting. The first thing we all did, was joining our 4 stripey homework squares together by knitting a square in the middle of them.

This was knitted backwards and forwards rather than circularly and then the diagonal seam was sewn using both colours so that each colour sewed together just its coloured stitches. It is one of those ideas which seems so obvious when someone suggests it but had never occured to me before!

Here is the same in different colours

Next we used our homework strip of knitting to learn how to knit another strip onto an existing strip.

The homework strip was the denim blue at the bottom of the page. We cast on the second strip (in this case the grey one) and then knitted it while at the same time attaching it to the first strip (denim blue). We used two different ways of attaching, both attaching one stitch every two rows. The first method was invisible from the right side, and the second created a decorative chain up. They are actually the reverse of each other so that the first method created the chain on the wrong side of the knitting, and the second method was invisible from the wrong side.

This method of joining involved picking up a stitch from the side of the first strip for every two rows of the second strip. Next we tried a join where we picked up stitches along the whole side of the second strip (the grey one), knitted a couple of rows, and then left these stitches on the needle to be joined to the third strip (purple). This pick up and knit is in blue so you can see it clearly on the sample. There are actually a couple of rows of the blue at the start of the purple strip but I can’t now remember why. The actual joining was very similar to the invisible join from the first two strips, the main difference being that the stitches had already been picked up and knitted from the side of the second strip, ready for attaching to the third, rather than picking them up one at a time as you got to them. We did a mitred square at the top of this strip to show that you didn’t just have to be knitting linear strips.

Lastly we picked up and knitted a kind of corrugated rib. Unfortunately I got the wrong end of the stick and messed this up. I think I was rather tired by that point in the day. Horst was very kind and actually went through this rib again with us in the pub after the workshop. Definitely beyond the call of duty! The green is the rib I did wrong, and the cream is the right one. It is a little hard to see from my picture but the purl furrows are different. The rib he was trying to get us to do involved working one row with the first colour, then sliding all the stitches back to the other end of the circular needle so that without turning the work you could knit the second row in the second colour. Then knitting back with the first colour, and again back with the second.

After that lot we had a go at his falling leaves pattern which he had used on a scarf.

I didn’t manage all this in the workshop, most of it was done at home afterwards so I could get more of a feel for how the leaves fitted together.
I really love the fact that this is reversible and I am definitely looking forward to doing some more experimenting with it. One of the ladies at the workshop had knitted a jacket using this idea and it was very nice.

All in all a very enjoyable and informative day, I had a wonderful time and learned a lot. I really must get round to finishing the mitred sweater I started in the Knitting Olympics!

While I busied myself with the yarn at Woolfest , my other half photographed all the animals. This is one of his pictures of the alpacas, I tried to post it as part of the previous post but Blogger decided it was no longer my friend and wouldn’t let me upload it. Blogger seems to be back and speaking to me again so here we are:

Aren’t they lovely! I am still trying to convince my sister that she needs to be an alpaca farmer. Then she could do all the hard work and I could come round and stroke them.

It has cooled down a bit here so I might actually do some knitting today, it has been rather too hot for me recently.

Well I think I am probably the most late in doing a post about Woolfest . We had a lovely two week holiday, a week in Ambleside, then a week up around Hadrian’s Wall, and did Woolfest in between. I have just about caught up with my emails and blog reading now, two weeks after we got back!

I didn’t go last year since I only found out about it just before it was on, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It was sort of cross between a knitting show and a livestock show, although the knitting yarn was definitely leaning towards natural yarns rather than sparkly man made stuff. Good fun was definitely had! Hi to Mary , it was lovely to see you, the new purple hearing aids are beautiful! Sorry my blogging still doesn’t seem to have sped up.

First off some pictures of the animals, first up the sheep:

I’m afraid I can’t remember what kind they are, but they were very photogenic!

More sheep:

and some Angora goats:

It was really interesting to see all the animals in the flesh, I was quite surprised by the variety in sizes of sheep, I think that the ones we usually see round here by the side of the road are all raised for their meat and so probably never get particularly big, since lamb is eaten more than mutton.

Now for the yarn, first from Wingham Wool Work , the loudest yarn you have ever seen!

My friend C (not a knitter but she makes jewellery and so understands!) was actually struck dumb by this – quite a feat I can assure you!
On the left we have the softest yarn you have ever felt, superfine merino in cream, and alpaca in black by Knit Global , bought from Spinning A Yarn . I think they are going to be hats, and I am going to have a go at dyeing the cream.

Then there is some Margaret Stove laceweight merino bought from KCG Trading . I also bought the new Norah Gaughan, Knitting Nature, and a shawl pattern and a circular needle (one size which I found I bizarrely didn’t already have) from them, but I forgot to take a picture.

The yarn on the right is Lana Grossa sock yarn, I can’t remember which stall I got it from and although I found a receipt in the bag it had no shop name on it either! Some one has missed out on a marketing opportunity!

Lastly the haul from Jamieson and Smith :

At the top we have hand dyed cobweb weight, and at the bottom two colours of their 2ply jumper weight. Sorry about the quality of the photograph, I still haven’t really got the hang of getting the lighting right.

Better go and have a panic now as the parents are turning up in about 15 mins and there is still stuff on the beds they are hoping to sleep on and a pile of yarn in the lounge. I doubt the pile of yarn will really be going anywhere but I might try and shuffle it round a bit to at least give the illusion of space.

I really will finish the write up of the Horst Schulz workshop (sorry Rosie!), I got half way through before we went on holiday and then accidentally deleted some of the pictures and then ran out of time. Things are calming down at work now though so I hopefully will have more blogging time soon.