How to tame a wild yarn

This is going to be pretty photo-heavy (especially for one of my posts), so I apologise in advance!

Well, no one correctly guessed the mystery item. I should have been kinder and included some kind of relative size thing - the piece is actually only about 8 inches or so long. Does that change your ideas? Watch this space...

A little while ago, Vicki gave me some amazing DK yarn. She'd enjoyed playing with it, but found it a bit strident and overpowering, and asked if I had any ideas on calming it down. She has a good point - we're talking neon variegated here:

This really doesn't do justice to the true eye-poppingness of the colours. The first thing we both knew about this yarn was how much it cheered up a dull Spring day - it makes you smile just to use it. But it had its problems.

First step was to see how it was in stocking stitch:

Like a lot of commercial yarns, the rigidly repeating colour changes make the colours tend to pool and stripe, even on a small swatch like this (about 4 inches square, on 4mm needles). The problem is, how to interrupt these sequences so that the effect is more mottled - and how to tone down the colours.

First of all, garter stitch - and this is where the mystery item comes in. Garter stitch breaks up the pooling somewhat because of the structure of the stitch. It's as if you can see the bumps and the v's of the stitches on the same side, instead of them being kept to one side each in stocking stitch:

If you compare this with the stocking stitch swatch, you'll see that the colours, while still being grouped together to some extent, are starting to look a little less regimented and more random.

So what is it?

It's a baby hat:

Isn't it fab?? Mum has been telling me for years about this pattern, which she knitted for loads of family children in the war years. It takes very little yarn, despite being in garter stitch, and is really fun to make. I finally found it reprinted by Sirdar in an early 70s pattern leaflet. So how does the strip become the hat? Simple - seam the top and bottom of the piece together, then sew each left-hand point to its neighbour. The right hand points become the 'cheeks' and peaked front of the hat. Then you knit a strap, find a button, and hey presto! One cute hat. I love it :)

Next I decided to try double-thickness knitting, the technique where you knit and slip alternately all the way along the first row, then slip and knit all the way back along the second, to produce a little 'bag' of knitting without circular needles or dpns. (Although there's an excellent article in Knitty about making a pair of socks with this method, using dpns - just like the woman in 'War and Peace'!)

Vicki has written a lovely pattern for an iPod cosy using this technique, so I tried it out:

This was odd, because I expected it to interrupt the colour changes altogether - instead of which, they ran round the entire pattern. And so, I should have realised, they were bound to do - it's a single piece of knitting, after all!

Looking for something that would really shake the colours up, I tried a mitre square:

This had a very interesting outcome, much more the kind of thing I was looking for. For an excellent tutorial on mitre squares, see Planet Shoup.

Now, how to tone it down? That bit was easy. Work it together with cream yarn of the same weight, in garter stitch on 6mm needles:

This has the immediate effect of diluting the colour. The stitch structure shows bits of cream yarn alongside bits of neon yarn, tricking our eyes into reading the whole thing as a paler version of the neon yarn. And, of course, being garter stitch, it disrupts the colour changes a little. (It's also a quick and easy way to make a thicker, springier fabric - it really is quite wonderfully squishable!)

Finally I tried a technique I found in The Knitting Answer Book (which I cannot recommend too highly. I only wish I were on commission). It's called helical knitting, or spiral knitting, because - you guessed it! - it's made in a spiral. Of course, all knitting worked in the round is a spiral, which is why we get the problem of the colour jog, but this technique actually capitalises on that instead of trying to fight against it.

You begin by casting on however many stitches you need, onto a circular needle or dpns. DO NOT join the round. Turn the work, attach the second yarn to the needle (you will now have two cast-on ends of yarn at the same end of the needle) and purl back in your second colour. You now have one row of each colour, with the working yarns both hanging at the same end. Pick up your first yarn and, without twisting the two yarns together, join the round and begin knitting. At the end of the round, swap to your second colour. Carry on till you're bored, work a 1x1 rib (still working alternate rounds in each colour), cast off, seam the top and you're holding a baby hat with no colour jogs. Honestly. It's like magic, do try it yourself.

I love learning new techniques :)

For the same reason as on the iPod cosy, the colours still tend to follow each other round the hat - but, for the same reasons as on the garter stitch square, they're also diluted by the cream and don't seem so strong anyway.

So there you go. A few ideas on the taming of wild yarns. I hope it's been helpful, because it's been lots of fun for me, and has brightened up several dull days. You can't knit with yarn like this and not feel happy :)

Now, especially for Tracey, two pictures of the beehive yarn holder. These used to be really common, but they're out of production now and can only be found on eBay and suchlike places. Because they're made of Bakelite, they're quite fragile (note the crack on the base of mine, where I knocked it from a table onto a wooden floor!), so they don't survive as well as some other designs:

It's about 5 inches high; the bigger hole on the top is for yarn, while the other two are for a ribbon handle (I took mine off because it was making an irritating noise against the yarn inside!). It's about four inches diameter at the base, so you can't put huge balls of yarn in it. It's the shape of an old-fashioned straw beehive (weren't they called 'skeps'?), but I don't know whether it was a promotional item for Patons Beehive yarn - there's no printing on it to tell me. There is a helpful needle gauge on the base, though:

Spot the crack, on the left!

The base screws off, you put the ball in, thread the end through the top, and screw the base back on. It's brilliant for stopping yarn rolling around, but you can't always see when you're nearing the end of a ball.

Well, this has been a bit of a marathon. It's taken me most of two days to put this together, so don't expect another post too soon :) Off to have a rest and a nice cup of tea.

Tigger says, "Does that mean I get biscuits?"

The biggest yarnover in the world

Of course, it had to happen, the minute I announced that I'd got the hang of lace knitting. Hubris - the kind of pride that comes before a fall....

I was swatching in the round, on a circular needle, with my yarn in one of those 1950s Bakelite beehive-shaped yarn holders. Every time I needed to stop, I put the beehive down in the middle of the circle, leaving it in a little moat of knitting. Every time I started again, I would move the beehive out of the centre, pick up the swatch, and carry on.

Except this one time. I can only excuse myself by saying I was talking (you should see me try to walk and chew gum at the same time), but I picked up the swatch first, then moved the beehive, pulled a length of yarn from it and started knitting. The quick-brained among you will realise what I did not (for two more rounds) - that in doing so, I had looped the working yarn down the inside of the swatch, back up the outside and up to the needle.

In other words, without noticing anything wrong with the position of the yarn, I had worked the world's biggest yarnover - not round my needle, but around the entire depth of my swatch.

And then I managed not to notice the fact for two rounds.

When I shut my mouth long enough to actually look at my knitting, it took me a good ten minutes just to figure out what on earth I'd done. And then another ten hiding my red face under the duvet so that it wouldn't distract aircraft overhead.

I tinked back the entire two rounds to make sure I had put it right, and to double-check what I had done wrong. It took a while.

Ahem. I can assure you I now double-check where my yarn is every time I restart, talking or not....

Now, to distract you from my tales of incompetence, a challenge. What is this?

Yes, yes, I know it's a strip of knitting. You know jolly well that's not what I meant. What is it going to be? Answer next time, when I show a variety of ways to tame a wild yarn....

Tigger says, "Leave me alone. The swine have stolen an hour of my nap time..."

This week, I 'ave mostly bin makin'... lace.

(Apologies to the Fast Show for mangling the catch phrase!)

I used to think I couldn't knit lace. My friends Mandy and Marilyn make the most beautiful cobweb lace shawls, the kind of thing you can pull through a wedding ring, and I was, and am, completely in awe of their abilities. Mandy gave me a selection of practice balls of cobweb yarn, and I struggled and sweated over them, eventually producing enough mangled and holey knitting to act as net curtains in my terraced house for the Homes and Gardens display.

I have drooled over many shawls, in patterns and on blogs, bewailing my dodgy eyesight and pudgy little fingers. I kept on trying to produce something lovely, only to produce something slightly grimy and of a rather more freeform design than I had intended.

A year or so ago, I had a bit of a revelation. For years I have been making crochet lace, both in thread and in yarn. (Apparently, according to Doris Chan, crochet lace worked in yarn is called 'exploded lace'. I just call it 'being able to see what I'm doing'...) If I could use yarn for crochet lace, then why not for knitting? And of course I could, as squillions of knitters have discovered before me. So, with a ball or two of Debbie Bliss Cathay, and needles that were visible to the naked eye, I set out on Lucy Neatby's 'Cloud Scarf' as a runner for my Welsh dresser. This is a very civilised pattern, as the edging is worked at the same time as the main piece :)

I loved working (slowly) on this, but I could only do it when I was feeling really awake and competent; understandably, therefore, the whole thing is still less than halfway finished, and has been completely frogged several times. After the first two froggings I learned to use lifelines, but then I got the lifeline tangled up in the unpicked yarn, and had to have the resultant mess forcibly pried from my shaking and tear-stained hands.

I have to be quite clear here, and say that this is not Ms Neatby's fault! I was working from her written instructions, but had to count every stitch across the row as I knitted it, because of my foggy brain. Thus I could never look ahead and see the structure of the entire piece in my mind. I struggled on, a row here and a row there, enjoying what I did, but achieving very little.

I really wanted to use some lace on a forthcoming commission, so I dug out the instructions for Feather and Fan (the only lace pattern I knew I could manage) and sat down to swatch. After a few repeats I was terribly bored, and felt like the whole thing just wasn't growing as fast as I'd like. I rooted around in my own notes, and in my stitch dictionaries, looking for lace patterns with only one or two lines to them. I found a few, and tried some of them out.

I separated each repeat with a stitch marker, as I do when working cable patterns: it saves a great deal of sanity if you can catch an error within a group of stitches, rather than getting to the end of a 100-stitch row and finding you're one stitch off....

I was still making heavy weather of following the patterns, so I thought I'd be brave and try using charts. I quite happily follow charts for Fair Isle, cable combos and knit/purl patterns, so why I was so worried by lace charts I don't know. I think it was all those squirly symbols.

Anyway, I set up my cast-on row, positioned my markers, took a deep breath, and... worked a flawless set of 15-stitch repeats right across the row. This had to be a fluke. I moved my chart marker up one row, and worked all the way back. And again. And again...

I was knitting lace :)

And honestly, that's all it's taken for the whole thing to click. I am still making errors, but it's so much easier to see how to pick up dropped stitches when you have a picture in front of you showing which stitch is above which other stitch. I am now working a 15-stitch 8-row repeat lace for the commission, a 25-stitch 28-row repeat in another yarn for a small group within the Knitting and Crochet Guild, and my Cloud Scarf is, excuse the pun, sailing along.

I don't know why it took me so long to take the step of using charts. I know the knitting community divides pretty sharply between chart lovers and written pattern users, but I had already used charts in other areas.

I love being surprised by unexpected abilities :)

And so to cat photos. I've been meaning to show you this one for ages - Vicki took it, to prove not only that I really do have two cats, but that they occasionally deign to share the same space:

Tigger says, "Don't be fooled. I have her trapped under this duvet now."

The creative wossname

I had a brilliant afternoon yesterday, simply following links to the websites of different artists (in all kinds of media and at all kinds of levels of competence). It was funny, touching, inspiring, and sometimes just downright weird....

I found a lot of the links on the Craftzine blog, although once you're on an artist's website it's fun to follow the links they recommend, too. Some of the best (for a variety of reasons!) were:

• Weird chocolate from Japan on PingMag
• A tutorial from Skinny laMinx on her amazing papercuts (click the gallery button, too)
• Photos of the winning entries in last year's Washington Tribune Peeps Diorama contest
• SockPixie's stashbusting Munchkin Slippers pattern
• The slightly unnerving work of Diem Chau (check out her crayon sculptures in 'Past Work', too)
• Party dresses made of balloons (yes, you read that right...)
• A Flickr set from the woman whose job it is to create kid-friendly craft projects for the official LucasArts Star Wars site. How cool a job is that.....

This is why I love the 'net. I would never have seen any of these by other channels. I find other people's work so inspiring - not in a plagiaristic way, but because the best art (and craft) makes you look at things a different way. And because some of the stuff out there is more bizarre than anything I could ever have dreamed up myself.

Tigger says, "I'm very artistic too, you know. I create poses."

Where did January go?

Still, here I am again - eventually!

Did everyone have a good Christmas? Was Santa kind? Richard and I had a splendid, very quiet time. Christmas always begins for me with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Radio 3 on Christmas Eve afternoon, although this year I felt there were too many unknown pieces that showed off the choir without really adding to the atmosphere. Everything sounded amazing, though.

We both had lots of small presents (books, gadgets, board games etc), which we prefer to large presents. The whole family is the same. Richard cooked a chicken, which was delicious (he's a very good cook).

Mum was staying with my sister for Christmas, so they visited on Boxing Day, which was like a second Christmas, swapping more presents! I ended up with five books (including Knit One, Haiku Too), four boxes of chocolates, some beautiful stationery, 3 bookmarks, some purple knitting needles and a stuffed bookworm (that is a seriously weird company :) ). Oh, and my kitchen lino, from Mum, my sister and my brother!

Richard excelled himself, with a stainless steel kitchen bin (mine is matt, not polished, though). I've wanted one for ages, but it's not the kind of thing you treat yourself to - well, I don't, anyway! He also got me a wondrous gadget called a Mood Beam. I've long been coveting the eggs Richard has which change colour, but my Mood Beam is even better - it has several modes, including following the beat of music. Mine is called Chipper (scroll down - he's at the bottom of the page).

I've been pretty productive over Christmas, too, producing a jumper for Knit Today with very few hiccups. The only one that really set me back was finishing the neckline, when I decided that I would do it on 3.75mm dpns instead of the 4mm needles I had been using throughout. One nasty, buckled, too-tight neckline later and I realised my error - I had to unpick the whole thing. Serves me right for not doing it the way I know will work!

I'm briefly between commissions now, so I'm trying out the new Purple Pins. I love making my own socks, because I can contour them to fit both my swollen legs and my perennially problematic short, wide feet with high insteps. Mum used to have such a fight on her hands to find me school shoes that fitted me! Even though the socks end up really wide (90sts on 2.5mm needles), they're fairly short, as I can't tolerate anything fitting too high up around my legs. I only work 3 inches, including the ribbing, before I work the heel. This means I can get a pair of socks, plus enough left over for something like an iPod cosy, from 100g of Opal yarn.

I'm using the Rainforest Tiger, and doing what Lucy Neatby suggests with the black stitches. If you have black working yarn and black stitches on your LH needle, then you purl them. The rest of the time, every stitch is knitted. This gives a raised section of black stitches which is very effective.

I used another of Lucy's design elements, which is the garter-stitch 'ribbing' from her Mermaid socks. Essentially you knit a strip of garter stitch (mine is 12 sts wide) until it will wrap around your leg, then join it and pick up your working stitches around one edge. This gives a soft, flexible fabric around the top of the sock, as well as ensuring you cast on the right number of stitches!

I'm also using a star toe which was featured in a recent SlipKnot, the journal of the Knitting and Crochet Guild. It looks more effective in a plain yarn, where you can see the points of the star more clearly, but it's still OK in printed yarn.

I have to say that I am happier with the second sock than with the first - the colour changes seem to be much more close together, whereas the first sock has big blocks of colour which I don't like as much. I'll get the Beamish Boy to photograph them when they're finished, and you can see what I mean.

Tigger is doing well - although, as it turns out, it's probably not asthma after all, as he didn't respond to the steroids. The vet then suggested lungworm treatment, which he said was a liquid we could mix into his food. Hah!

He had to have half a teaspoonful of what looked like PVA glue, and apparently tasted disgusting. We tried disguising it in moist food, yoghurt, beef paste. We tried bundling him up in a towel and squirting it down his throat. Nothing worked.

We ended up smearing it onto his fur so that he had to lick it off, and even then he sometimes managed to wipe it all over the furniture. Not a good time!

He seems perfectly happy and energetic still, with bright eyes and shiny fur, so the next thing the vet's doing is - nothing. He says that there are other treatments we can try if Tig gets worse, but that they all have side effects, and would damage his quality of life. In the mean time, he is still rushing round like an idiot, ambushing everyone who comes in and demanding a cuddle, and watching every mouthful I eat because he is a Starving Kitten and Never Gets Fed....

Tigger says, "I have to make do with the crumbs from their table, you know. And I don't even like raspberry."

And now - maths and knitting :)

Well, so much for posting on my third blogiversary (3 December)! I've been knitting my little fingers to the bone to complete a private commission which I actually took on in April. I didn't realise at the time how long it would take me to produce the Simply Knitting plus-size set, and poor Penny (the commissioner) has been very patient.

She has been planning this jumper in her head for years, because she's never seen anything similar in the shops. She wanted a sleeveless polo neck, hip length - with a ten-inch diameter circular hole in the back to show off a tattoo... Well, the jumper itself was no problem (except that she wanted it in Rowan Tapestry with the stripes running vertically, so I had to do it side-to-side), but, oh, that hole!! I was panicking all the time I was working on it, in case it was in the wrong place, or too big, or too small, or not round enough.

Eventually, the Beamish Boy made use of his maths training, and worked out how many stitches I had to lose (or gain) on each line, and produced me a chart for the first quarter of the hole, which I then had to read backwards or upside down for the other three quarters. Success! One perfectly round hole, which I then had to edge with ribbing and find a way to cast off, flat. After three days of experiment, and two reknittings of the entire rib, I cast off using a crochet hook, with 3 chain stitches between each cast-off stitch. Next I made a crochet chain and threaded it through the 3-chain loops, drawing it up to the required size. Even then, it came out rather oval, from the weight of the garment pulling on it.

I've never had such a reception for anything I've made, in any way, ever. I hadn't realised how personal and important this jumper was to her, until I saw her tears of happiness over it. I admit I was pleased with it myself, but she was ecstatic. It's lovely to get such a personal response!

Anyway, because her name is Penny, she requested I call the pattern Pénélopé - not that I'm likely to use it again, of course! - and here she is:

The other big news is that poor Tigger had to go to the V-E-T because his breathing was a bit fast. Well, after telling me he was fine in every other way than his breathing, and taking some phenomenally expensive x-rays, the V-E-T decided he probably has asthma! Apparently it's common in cats. I wonder if they're allergic to themselves...

So, that's two of us puffing and panting and taking steroids, then. I know he loves me, but copying my illnesses is going a bit far :)

Tigger says, "I hope you're not expecting me to stick those pipes up my nose..."

When Physics and Knitting Collide

Sometimes it is very easy to make a very big mistake. Even though you do all the right things - you swatch, you measure, you plan and execute perfectly - the God of Knitting Physics still comes along and raps you smartly over the head with a 15mm wooden needle, just to keep you in line.

I had a bit of a disaster. I started the third item from Simply Knitting's plus size collection, which was to be a loose garter stitch slipover to pop on top of a camisole to disguise the old "flying squirrel" arms that so many of us of a Certain Age experience. I really don't know why I design things in garter stitch, because it bores me rigid - bits of it here and there are fine, but an entire garment can get a bit tedious. To be honest, I feel much the same about stocking stitch. Stripes or stitch patterns are much more fun, because you can say to yourself, "Ooh, I'll just do another stripe", whereas you're very unlikely to say, "Ooh, I'll just do another few rows of stocking stitch"!

Anyway, I'd swatched carefully before I began and was quite confident that, even though I was knitting on bigger needles to increase the lacy effect, I was going to get a garment of the right proportions. Halfway through, I decided I was bored with garter stitch and, because I was working from side to side, thought it would be more fun to do the second half of the garment in drop stitch. I swatched again very carefully and found that the stitch count matched perfectly, although obviously the row count was different. This wasn't a problem as I could simply knit the same width of material as I had on the first half. I recalculated the decreases for the sleeve and set off on drop stitch.

I finished the top a lot more quickly (gotta love those wide drop-stitch rows!) and cast off. And then I held up the neck opening. The garter-stitch half of the neckline (a slash neck going from front to back) was about three inches smaller than the drop-stitch side. After a moment's panic, I realised that this was because I had cast off too tightly. I decided to be brave, unpick the cast off, and redo it with a looser one. I consulted the Oracle (aka The Knitting Answer Book by Margaret Radcliffe - thoroughly recommended; I'm sure it doesn't have everything in it, but so far it hasn't let me down) and picked the tubular cast off, which is a sewn cast off. Well, it was a bit fiddly till I got into the rhythm of it, but it worked perfectly and I congratulated myself that at least I had learned a new technique.

I sewed up the sides and found a similar problem on the drop stitch seam - again I had cast off far too tightly, and had to unpick it and do it again. This time I tried the Yarn-Over Cast Off which is absolutely brilliant if you, like me, tend to cast off too firmly. Effectively, it lengthens the stitches on the cast-off edge, and it's really easy to do:

Step 1: Knit the first stitch on the needle.
Step 2: Bring the yarn forward and slip the stitch you've just knitted over that yarn.
Step 3: Knit the next stitch from the left-hand needle and pass the stitch already on the right-hand needle over this new stitch.

And that's it - just repeat steps 2 and 3 to the end of the row. You can experiment with the yarn overs - you may find that you only need to do the yarn over bit every two or three stitches, depending on the tightness of your casting off. Clever, isn't it?

So I'd reworked the cast off on the neck, I'd done the same on the side seams, I'd learned two new techniques while doing so, and I was feeling pretty smug. Finally I did what I should have done a lot earlier in the proceedings - I got Richard to hold it up for me.

And it stretched.

And stretched.

And stretched.

What had been planned as a slipover that would end just below the waist was now six feet long and still going. And this is where the Physics comes in. What had I forgotten? Unlike Isaac Newton, I had forgotten to account for gravity. Stretchy yarn + big needles + gravity = the longest waist-length garment that has ever been seen in the history of knitting.

I didn't quite believe what I was seeing at first. My initial reaction was, "Maybe it will ride up a bit when it's put on..." Well, I gave up on that idea when Richard proved to me that the neck opening had stretched to a point where it would fall from my shoulders to the floor without touching me at any point. There was nothing left but to try to unpick it. Sadly the yarn, although lovely to work with, did not take kindly to being unpicked. Instead, I had to grovel to Debora - the very understanding editor at Simply Knitting - who is sending me some replacement yarn with which I intend to make an entirely different garment...

(If you're wondering why I hadn't held it up before, it's because I have been put back on to bed rest, having overdone it with the whole Walking Round the House bit. It's quite hard to hold up a garment to its full length when you only have little arms.)

Tigger says, "Will you stop waking me up with that camera? I'm enjoying this bed rest stuff...."

Crossroads

It can't have escaped anyone's notice that I have not had a brilliant year, healthwise.

It has taken me nearly a year to design and produce a set of three plus-size garments for Simply Knitting (although I did use the time when I was waiting for yarn to knock out a baby cardigan for Knit Today, too). My blogging has been sporadic, and I have yet to provide the Beamish Boy with any content for the wonderful website he has designed for me - it's all already written, but I want to rewrite bits of it before it goes live, and I rarely have the mental stamina to face doing it.

I don't want to give up designing - I still have a headful of unused ideas! - but I find myself at a crossroads. On the one hand I have the option of employing outworkers to knit the actual garments, so that I can concentrate on designing, swatching, submitting ideas and so on. This would be OK up to a point, but I find a lot of my designs evolve as I knit them. It would also be difficult to pay people the minimum wage, as I don't even get that for the entire garment :)

I also have several people urging me to submit book outlines to publishers and, while I have plenty of material, I would need a co-author to do the actual work of putting the thing together - writing a book, especially a non-fiction, 'how to' book, with lots of pictures, is unbelievably complicated and very hard work. I learned that back in my old days of freelance copy editing, when one of my clients was a firm producing art books.

So I have quite a clear decision before me - do I expand my output by bringing in other people, or do I pull back a little and do what I can with my own resources?

I didn't begin designing to become a brand. I have huge respect for people like Debbie Bliss, Louisa Harding, Erika Knight - I have no idea how they achieve so much great work when there are only 24 hours in the day, but I suspect they survive on little sleep :) Even if I wanted to emulate them, I don't have the physical or mental stamina to allow me to do so, and that is something I have to keep learning over and over again. You'd think, after ten years of illness, that I'd know this, but it doesn't stop me overdoing things....

I started designing because that's the way my brain works, sick or well. I love seeing an idea evolve as I create it. I didn't want a job. I can't really cope with a job :) So these are the decisions I've come to:

• I'm no longer designing things just because they're trendy. Anything I make will be something I love for itself. If I don't have much energy, I want to use it on designs I will enjoy making.
• The design process carries on right through the garment, so - no outworkers. I'd be missing out on a vital part of the project.
• I'm not going to be simply creating things to sell, one after another. I need socks. And I want to try the Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Surprise Jacket, just because.
• No book projects.
• I want to take a little time out soon to do my part of the website, so that the Beamish Boy can finish it and it can start earning me money (by selling my patterns, although there will be free stuff too).
• Must blog more!!
  
• NO MOHAIR!!1!!!!! Ahem. Sorry. But no mohair. It makes me wheeze :(

I know it's not the obvious way forward for a designer, but I've always hankered for 'the road less travelled'. Let's hope that, for me, it will prove to make all the difference.

Tigger says, "Do what you like. Just take time to tickle my belly."

What I Did On My Summer Holidays

It's been an interesting few weeks. Shortly after my last entry, I unexpectedly received the keys to the bungalow for which I'd been lobbying the council since the beginning of June. Exciting though this was, I was less than impressed to be told that I had only 2 weeks to move into it before I started paying rent on both properties. For those of you contemplating a house move, may I just say that it is possible to go from zero to Moving In in 10 days. I know this, because we did it! Lots of lists and a hard-working removals firm that packs as well as moves is all that you need. And a sense of humour. And a handful of takeaway menus. And a devilishly handsome son.

So, we moved in on 25th July, and thanks to the Beamish Boy everything was pretty much unpacked after a week. It's a brilliant house with a big living room, two decent sized bedrooms, a good kitchen, a lovely large bathroom, and laminate flooring throughout. It's wonderfully quiet, in the middle of a figure-of-eight shaped cul-de-sac. We look out onto two big oak trees in the middle of a lawn, and the road, which has very little traffic on it, runs down one side of us. It was well worth all the aggravation to get here, and we both love it.

Of course, being me, I couldn't let things go too smoothly. We'd just got sorted out when I developed cellulitis in both legs. A week after that, while they were still recovering, I had a dodgy prawn curry and ended up flat on my back with food poisoning for a fortnight. This, of course, made my legs flare up again. Then my chest - not wanting to miss out on the action - went haywire and I had to have a course of steroids.

So, ask me how I feel :) Actually, now that I'm eating properly again, and my legs are improving - which means I can walk around better - I'm feeling almost like my old self. My chest feels fine and I've even managed to start knitting again. Yes, gentle reader, I was Too Ill To Knit. It was awful.

In the last few days I have sent a completed baby garment off to Knit Today. They're very pleased with it and, I must admit, so am I. There's something very satisfying about making small garments, and it's not just the quick fix of having finished something. It's to do with nurturing and protecting as well. The magazine chose the most gorgeous colour (I hate wishy-washy pastels on babies, and apparently they can't see them very well), and I got to use some of my extensive collection of decorative buttons. Not sure when that's being published, but watch this space.

I'm still writing up the pattern for the second plus-size garment for Simply Knitting, and I had a bit of a hiccup with the yarn for the third one. Let's just say mohair is not a friend to my chest...

Another good piece of news is that Feed The Children UK have finally managed to produce their pattern booklet, Best Yarn Forward. This is the one for which I designed a boy's sweater in Sirdar Denim Aran. The booklet also includes a selection of patterns by the late Judith Whincup plus a beautiful little girl's dress by Mary-Louise Quick which is worth the cover price on its own. You get 6 patterns, and a number of motifs with which to jazz them up, for £3.50 (plus P&P) from Feed The Children UK. And well done to Kim Tame who was responsible for putting the whole thing together.

The cats, by the way, have settled in wonderfully, although Chloë was quite traumatised and tried to hide in a cupboard when we first got here. They now have a cat flap, which they take turns in staring through as if it were merely a handy cat-height window. Chloë won't use it at all, and Tigger will only use it to come in - preferring instead still to leave through the window. He always bursts through the flap with great excitement, bounding down the hall and proclaiming his return in a loud voice. By the speed at which he comes through, I think he must take a run up. It's certainly easier, now that we're here, to keep an ear on them, because their claws click on the floor as they walk :)

Hopefully it won't be so long before my next entry. To all of you out there who are moving house this year, all I can say is: best of British, and I hope it goes as smoothly as ours did :)

Tigger says, "It's very tiring, all this moving house lark. I have to find all new sleeping places... and break in new Little Old Ladies."

Brought to Book

I've always been a great one for writing things down. Even before I developed Marshmallow Brain, I had a diary full of lists that had to be ticked off, and strange entries like "Water filter will need changing today". I also had a journal and, separate from that, a notebook for my creative writing. This was all, of course, before I had a decent computer and could store it all on that.

What I haven't computerised (apart from yearly lists of items and garments I have completed, and to whom they've been given) is my series of knitting notebooks. I currently have three, although I considering merging them all into one, in the interests of saving my muscles. I know I would get through notebooks three times as quickly, but at least I'd only have one to drag out every time I wanted to put something in it.

The first one is my knitting journal. At the moment, this is a rather fetching suede-covered notebook, courtesy of eBay. I'm not one to keep ball bands, samples of yarn, or tension squares but I do copy out all the information along with what tension I got, an overview of the whole project, and any problems I met along the way. I also record start and finish dates, and the eventual recipient.

The second one is my design notebook. At the moment, I'm using a Cath Tate spiral-bound A5 affair. The covers are printed with close-up photos of fair isle, and the front cover also has a delightful old-fashioned photo of small child, swathed in many knitting garments, with the caption: "Life would be so much nicer if my mother would only stop knitting", which makes me giggle every time I look at it. This contains sketches of potential designs, schematics, inspirational postcards, and the like.

Finally I have my Useful Bits-and-Bobs notebook, where I jot down stitch patterns of which I like the look, handy little wrinkles that I've worked out myself, and information to which I need frequently to refer, like measurements for each of the sizes I knit. I have a particularly groovy book for this one - a type I have just discovered at Ecotopia - which uses recycled carrier bags for the covers. Some of the pieces are still recognisable (there's a large chunk of a Tesco bag on the front), but I am desperate to find out who provides leopard-print carrier bags. There's just a sliver of one on the back. (They also make book covers from juice cartons, circuit boards, and tyres.) This one has all sorts of peculiar little snippets of information in it, and I thought it was about time I started to share them...

Pompoms, for example, seem to have come back into fashion recently, but I've always been a bit hit-and-miss with my sizes. I discovered that there are actual rules: the outer circumference of the cardboard ring should be a little larger than the desired size. The diameter of the hole should be between a third and a half of the total diameter. The larger the hole, the more tightly packed will be the finished pompom.

Alternatively, of course, you can do what I did the last time I made pompoms and buy one of those nifty plastic pompom makers. They are amazing. You get pompoms in about a minute :)

Oh, and I might occasionally post items from my Commonplace Book, where I keep all my favourite quotations. I have a section at the back called "English As She Is Spoke", which is home to all the bludgeonings of our mother tongue which I've encountered, usually on TV or radio. For example, on this week's 8 Out Of 10 Cats:

Sean Lock: It was a case of mistaken identity.
Trisha Goddard: Why?
Sean Lock: Because he thought I was somebody else!

If I tell you that Richard and I laughed at that until we wept, it'll give you a good idea of how bad a sense of humour we share :)

Tigger says, "I wish they wouldn't laugh so much; it's very disturbing."