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April 30, 2006
Various things
Friday, I spent some time in Utrecht, one of the four major cities in the Netherlands. It's about one hour on the train from where I live. It's a lovely place, and home to one of my favorite yarn shops: Modilaine at the Lijnmarkt. When I'm in Utrecht, I always pay this shop a visit, even if I don't need antyhing in particular. Somehow, I always manage to buy something anyway. The excuse 'but I am here now, I don't know when the next opportunity to buy lovely yarn will be' always seems to work. So this time this is what came home with me:
Four balls of Rowan 4 ply soft. This will become a hooded baby sweater. Yes, the baby had better appreciate this kind of luxury! But I'm knitting for my own pleasure as well, so nice materials are a must.
The second Ellen's stocking is approching the toe. I can't wait to wear these.
Rineke made some flowers using my pattern. I love the colors she used. She also made a flower with a pencil in the stem instead of a pipe cleaner. Very clever and a lovely result, check it out!
I made some more flowers too.
For the orange one, I did a variation on my basic pattern to make it more ball-shaped.
On a different note: it looks like I'm the only Nancy Bush fan! Clicking from link to link in the comments, I found a Flickr pool for Nancy Bush knits. Very inspirational!
Posted by saartje at 4:25 PM | Comments (11)
April 27, 2006
I'm spoiled
I really love the patterns by Nancy Bush. I own all of her books, they just give me inspiration everytime I leaf through them, no matter how often. If you like to knit small items, like socks, gloves and mittens, and you like classical patterns, textured or colorful, these are books for you. I've made lots of things from them, especially socks. You can check them out in my album of finished things. In the socks album, I put the socks I made from Nancy's books in the first three subalbums.
So Ellen's Stockings are coming along nicely.
Even though I've made them before, I'm enjoying it a lot.
And now I want to tell you about this wonderful gift I received last week. Take a look at this:
A large bag of special Easter M&M's (don't have those in my part of the world), a Sheboygan refridgerator magnet (Sheboygan is a town in Wisconsin, USA, (such an interesting name!)), lovely card and.... a skein of KnitPicks Color your own Merino! Of course you know KnitPicks, the American yarn company that sells great yarn and doesn't ship anywhere but to the USA and Canada? Thankfully, some clever knitters have found ways to send things to other parts of the world, proving it can be done. Of course, you don't really have to go as far as Roberta did to get this package to me: she travelled all the way to Europe and put it in the mail over here! Thank you so much, Roberta! I'm already planning dyeing this wonderful, soft yarn. I bought some indigo when I was in Egypt years ago, maybe I will try that. I've never dyed with indigo before, but I found some tutorials on the web.
Thankfully, the weather is getting better and better, because indigo dyeing is a job to do outside, so I've heard. Our balcony is big enough, I think. Right now, I'm going to take my tea and my knitting and enjoy the flowers out there. I took today off!
Posted by saartje at 11:58 AM | Comments (5)
April 23, 2006
Knitting on
I really value all your sympathy and encouragement about the Mermaid situation! I know I will make it right someday, right now I'm having fun with Ellen's Stockings.
I finished the first one today. It's a lovely pattern, though I did change some things of course, like using my own heel and toe. To take this picture, I put the sock on a sock blocker I made from a wire clothes hanger. It was very easy to make using the instructions from the Needletrax website.
You were right, the blooming tree I showed in my last entry was indeed a willow, a Goat Willow [boswilg] to be exact. I'm enjoying the way nature is waking up after its wintersleep. Today, I took this picture:
It's a Lady's Mantle [vrouwenmantel], covered in dew droplets. Nice, eh? The weather was quite nice this weekend, with some sunshine which made for a pleasant temperature. And I wasn't the only one enjoying it!
Some lovely, new yarn-to-be!
Posted by saartje at 9:20 PM | Comments (9)
April 18, 2006
Disaster
Thank you all for your lovely reactions to my Norwegian/Japanese gloves! I've been wearing them (it's still quite cold in the mornings here, especially when you're riding a bike) and they feel very nice. They also fit me very well, except maybe for the thumb placement, but even that is okay, really. All in all, a very satisfying project, which is more than I can say for some other project....
The notorious Mermaid.
I was knitting away on the second sleeve, maybe not so happily, but with perserverance. Somehow, it occurred to me there was something odd about the way it was turning out. That's when I decided to put it against the first sleeve and look:
The horror! It is 5 stitches longer than the first! How on earth did this happen?? I thought I followed the pattern carefully! Oh, I really don't want to rip and start again.... Yes, I'm sobbing right now.... I know I will find a solution, but right now the only thing I could think of was to stuff the thing into a bag and start a new pair of socks.
The pattern is Ellen's socks from Folk Knitting in Estonia by Nancy Bush. I've done these before and I'm enjoying them just as much the second time.
I'm also enjoying the small signs of Spring around me, like these daffodils and some kind of blooming tree.
Most others tree, on the other hand, are still looking like this:
Well, at least I get the chance to wear my new gloves before it's to warm.
Posted by saartje at 10:17 PM | Comments (13)
April 15, 2006
The gloves are done
The Norwegian-Japanese gloves are finished! They turned out to be a very quick knit: they took me only 4 days to make, out of which I had to work 3 days. I think it had a lot to do with the heavier weight yarn. These were knit on 3 mm needles in stead of the 2 mm needles I'm used to. With only 54 stitches in the round, and a stranded pattern that makes you want to knit the next round, and the next, and the next.... you're finished in no time!
Knitting these from a Japanese pattern was not a problem at all. If you want to see what the pattern looks like, go to this entry on Nanettes blog. She is showing a picture of what a Japanese pattern looks like. I did notice a mistake in the charts: the motifs on the fingers are not the exactly same in the charts as they are in the photographs in the front of the book. I followed the charts and I'm okay with how they turned out. Next time however, I will make them like the photographs.
Details of this project are over here.
Okay, so now those are done, I can finally concentrate on the last sleeve of my Mermaid. I did get some rows done today, see?
I hope to get it done before I have to return to work again on Tuesday. Not sure if I will make it though... it's such a boring thing to knit and the way the pattern is written just annoys me terribly. Oh well, the end result will be great, so I just have to get on with it!
Posted by saartje at 10:22 PM | Comments (17)
April 14, 2006
Gloves....
I started the lovely gloves from my Japanese knitting book. I feel kind of bad about it, because the last Mermaid sleeve has been put aside again, but I just couldn't stop myself. And Nanette has started too, I couldn't let her knit these all by herself now, could I?
Luckily, it's going pretty fast. I already finished the first glove and started the second. I thought about which colors to use for a while, and decided to go with the red and white they used in the book. Nanette picked some completely different colors, I love the way it makes the pattern look so different but gorgeous as well.
The pattern isn't difficult to follow, even though it's in Japanese. I'm glad they write numbers the same way we do! All the information you need is in the schematics. Of course, I did manage to do something wrong with the finger tip decreases, but that was my own fault for not paying enough attention. It looks okay though, so I'm leaving it like this.
One thing I will change on my next pair is the placement of the thumb. For me, it should be a little more to the side of the hand. I can fix it easily when I do this pattern again.
Spring is slowly arriving over here. I bought some plants to put on our balcony.
I love the colors of these pansies, they really cheer up the place.
Posted by saartje at 12:28 PM | Comments (14)
April 8, 2006
Done!
Suddenly, I had the urge to finish the Opal Prisma socks I had been working on since February 24th. So I sat down at the computer, reading lots of blogs and knitted away. I finished them this afternoon.
Panter is sniffing my toes, I think she likes the new socks. I'm pleased with them as well. I like the colors and the pattern, even though I'm generally not very fond of self striping yarn. I'm glad to finally finish something again, the last thing I finished was my Noro scarf at March 10.
Anne and serveral other of you asked about Mermaid. She's fine, thank you. I finally had the guts to set in the first sleeve. I was very anxious is wouldn't work because of the odd shape of the sleeve cap. But I decided to try it anyway and look:
It works!
All I have to do now is take a deep breath and cast on for the second sleeve...
Posted by saartje at 9:06 PM | Comments (9)
April 6, 2006
Flowers, socks, books
Well, I hope you're all making lots of knitted flowers. Thank you for your enthousiasm about my tutorial (see right side bar, in case you missed it). Angsoka already made one, look here. Don't mind the two (at least) terrible mistakes I made trying to comment in French.
I've been quite busy lately, I'm exhausted when I come home from work. If you're expecting an email from me, please be patient, I very much behind, but catching up slowly.
Slowly, that's a good word to descibe the progress on my various knitting projects. The best I can give you at the moment is this:
I finished the first Opal sock and started the second. Exciting, isn't it?
Some days ago, Nanette wrote an entry about something called the Library Thing. It is an online service, where you can make a catalog of all your books. If your books are mostly in English, German, French or Japanese, it's very easy to add books because you can search for them through Amazon and add them to you catalog with one click of your mouse. I had a lot of fun adding most of my knitting books. I still have some left to add manually, but I have 50 books in there already. Talk about confrontation.... Well, I was happy to see Nanette had 74! And the cool thing is: when I went to check out her catalog (while I still was logged on) it told me we have 22 books in common!
You can check out my catalog over here.
Posted by saartje at 7:20 AM | Comments (5)
April 2, 2006
Knit a flower
Thanks everyone, for your enthousiastic reactions to my knitted flowers! During my trainride from Groningen to Nijmegen yesterday, I made another one and took pictures of the various stages. Today, I put together a tutorial in Dutch as well as English, so you can make your own, if you like. The link is also in the sidebar on the right.
Let me know if you make any! If you find any mistakes in the pattern, please let me know so I can adjust it right away.
When I came home yesterday, a surprise was waiting for me.
A box of lovely lavender Shetland yarn from Klaziens Kreatie! I had comletely forgotten I ordered it at the Needlecraft Fair in Zwolle, about a month ago. Such a nice surprise! I'm going to use it to make this:
Salina, from Rowans Vintage Style book. I'm very happy with the color I picked. But before I can start, I want to finish some other things first....
Posted by saartje at 1:29 PM | Comments (17)
