Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to knitting something fabulous …not going all the way, and not starting.”

(Buddha, 563-483 B.C.)

I think copied that quote down correctly, anyway. I can’t remember if Buddha actually said ‘knitting something fabulous’ or ‘peace’, but it was one of the two.

So, I am currently suffering from a bout of ’startitis’, a word which I have nabbed off of somewhere else, but I cannot for the life of me remember where. Actually I am not sure if the symptoms are those of startitis, as I have definitely started the new pair of socks I am trying to knit for my Brother in law… nine times.

I have been on the quest for a fantastic sock cuff.  Firm, yet stretchy, and without the tight pull of even the most elastic of cast-ons, garrotting the blood supply and leaving an itchy welt.  These socks are not for me.  They are for a beloved brother-in-law of whom I am very fond.  Still, my fondness does not extend to me wrapping my hands around his calf to get an idea of how large his legs are for the purpose of making a pair of socks for his christmas surprise, so I needed to find a cuff that would fit no matter what.

I have tried various cast-ons (long tail, old Norwegian, tubular…), various stitches and techniques, yet none seemed to stretch as much as my store bought socks.  So, after much fiddling around, many hours and a healthy dose of muttered swear words, I think I have found something that I love. I’m going to knit a few inches of sock just to make sure it is as fabulous at the job as I hope it will be, and (fingers crossed) if it is I will note down the details tomorrow.

Today is cold, grey and showery (a typical Bank Holiday weekend in other words) but the onset of autumn and winter always gives occasion to look forward to wearing more warm and snuggly knits.

Roll on the snow!

The Baktus scarf is finished and blocked.

I was reading about the inspiration for the name ‘Baktus’ and found that Baktus and Karius are characters from a  Norwegian children’s book – they are two trolls that live in the teeth, and Bactus is a play on words from ‘bacteria’.  Anyway, thinking this scarf to be too pretty to be names after toothrot, I have called it ‘Regnbue’, which is Norwegian for rainbow.

Made from a single 100g ball of sock yarn, this is a quick and inexpensive project that makes a lovely gift. To make the most of the yarn for this project you should have a digital scale to hand as this allows you to weigh the yarn in the skein as you knit until you have half of your yarn left, then you start decreasing which means you end up with no waste.

Made with a single ball of Schoppel-Wolle’s Crazy Zauberball (shade used: Little Fox), the completed and blocked scarf measures exactly 60″(153cm) in length and 12″ (30cm) at the widest point where I had increased to 86 stitches.
The pattern for Baktus can be found here on Flickr.

A digital weighing scale is a handy thing to have in your knitting kit.  Most digital kitchen scales that work in 1g increments will suffice for the needs of most knitters.  I actually have a small digital jewellery scale that works in increments of 1/10th of a gram, but I have had them for many years and long before I started knitting.  They are, however, very handy as they are only 4×6″ in size and fit easily into my knitting bag.

Digital scales are inexpensive, and (if you have a set that you can also use in the kitchen) great for making cakes.  A digital weighing scale is indispensable when making a pair of socks or mittens from a single skein of yarn.  The popular Baktus scarf (which I am currently in the process of blocking) requires you to cast on only a few stitches, slowly increase along one edge until you have knit exactly half of your yarn, and then decrease along the same edge until you are back to your original cast on number of stitches and out of yarn.  It’s a fantastic pattern for getting the most out of a single ball of yarn with no waste at the end, but guesswork as to when you have reached the halfway point of your ball of yarn could lead to tears and naughty words.

You can pick up a pair of digital jewellery scales for about £7-8 on eBay, and you can find digital kitchen scales in any shop that sells kitchen equipment. If you want to test the kitchen scales out by making a cake, please feel free to send any baked goods to me and my cake-trained palette will be happy to tell you if your scales have resulted in baking success.

Some people seem to have an innate sense of what colours look good together, whereas some people feel so overwhelmed by the thought of combining several shades into a one outfit that they end up sticking to what they know and living a monotone life.  I have pretty strong ideas about which colours I like.  I love a dusky pink alongside a sage green, I love to see rich brown the colour of bitter chocolate alongside a pale turquoise, but I have always had a strong idea of what colours I favour, whether they are in vogue or not (though, usually, not).

Though colour choice is and will always be a personal thing, there are a few tools to help those that want to experiment but don’t want to end up looking like 1980s Christmas decorations…

Colour Lovers is one of my favourite sites for searching out palettes of colour.  The pro palette maker provides many tools to create and view your own colour combinations.  If you are unsure of how a number of colours you have been admiring online might look together you can simply use the slide controls to pick out those colours and observe them together.  If you have no preconceived idea of what colours you might like to try then the huge library of user made colour palettes are always a great place to start looking for information.

The colour lovers site is only one of thousands of resources available to you on the internet, but it is the one that I find myself returning to most often – much of the time just to browse and admire, and to remind myself not to keep returning to the colour combinations that I have had prior success with.

A year and a half ago I was wandering around a bookstore when Craig picked up a book called ‘I Love Knitting’ and held it out to me. I couldn’t tell you what made him push the book into my hands for me to look at, but I felt like I should buy it. On the way home from the bookstore we called into a general homewares shop that just happened to stock two sizes of grey powdered aluminium needles and three or four shades of acrylic with all of the tactile crunchiness of fresh cornflakes.

That evening I cast on for the first time and before even trying it decided that I did not like Garter Stitch. Even in the pages of the book garter stitch looked clumsy and childish next to the smooth, uniform fabric of stockinette stitch, or the interesting textures of the other simple stitches on display.

My very first piece of knitting wasn’t in garter stitch. In fact, my first ever attempt at actually knitting a few stitches was done in moss stitch, for some reason. I even have a picture to mark the occasion.

I couldn’t understand why anyone would enjoy the look of garter stitch – it looked so naïve.  Surely it was the stitch that people learned to ‘get used’ to the knit stitch before going on to learn properly, and which they then forgot about when they learned how to do the proper stitches?

This view seemed to reside in my subconscious for quite a long time, until one day I saw the most simple short scarf/cowl you might imagine. Made with chunky yarn and in simple, naïve, beautiful garter stitch.  Like paring a piece of furniture down to its most basic elements, this stitch achieved such a simplicity of design in this scarf because of its properties – edges that don’t curl, identical on each side, and a lovely thick, warm and stretchy resulting fabric.

I had a quick look around for small and quick pattern done in garter stitch and found the Knitted Kitty pattern.

I kept it to a small project because I wasn’t sure if the garter stitch, despite my new-found appreciation of its form, would keep my interest. I am only now attempting my first garter stitch project of any notable size, and just past the half-way point I can feel that I am starting to tire of the monotony just slightly, but I have an audiobook on the go to keep me occupied in a secondary way, and the constantly changing colours of the yarn I am using are at least providing an element of surprise eery few inches or so. Hopefully I shall be able to judge in a day or so whether the effect of the finished article was worth it.

I am now an exhausted Mimi in London.  Today I went for a picnic in a nature (not naturist) reserve with my cousin, nephew/2nd cousin type person of a grand 2 years old, and grandmother, where we ate (unintentionally) warm sandwiches and melted Kit-Kats.  With my first face-full of sunshine for about a month I took the opportunity to start up that project I had intended for yesterday’s train journey.

I’m knitting this with my lovely Crazy Zauberball by Schoppel Wolle.  An addition to the popular zauberball range, ‘crazy’ zauberballs have two separately coloured plys which each have their own colour gradient progressing from one super-saturated shade to the next.  The effect is of a gradual flow of colour broken up by the ‘noise’ of another gradient.  I have confused matters further by winding the ball into two seperate, equal length balls of yarn and knitting them into stripes.

The yarn is quite soft, but not as ’silky’ feeling as the single-ply zauberball, but it seems strong and is definitely fun to knit with, and I’m enjoying the element of surprise in discovering what effect s rendered as two stretches of yarn meet as I knit along and one combination slowly fade into the next.

This project is going quite quickly, so I hope to be finished in a few shorts days, and then I can reveal what will either be something eye-catching and gorgeous, or something which resembles the murder of a troupe of clowns that has taken place in a paint factory.

So, who’s up on their popular patterns enough to take a punt at what this might be?

_{Here’s a (cryptic) clue: You might say it is a project you can get your teeth into.  (If you think that you know what it is and yet the clue makes no sense to you, type the pattern name into Google and you might find it click into place).}

I was hoping to have a picture of my latest ‘work in progress’ to share today, but at the moment it would be very unimpressive. Last night I cast on and knit but a few rows in anticipation of the train journey I knew I was to do today, and hoped to get 2½ hours of quality knitting time in whilst I shut out the din of complaining children and nasal-whining groups of people talking too loudly with my trusty iPod, and trying to ignore the whiff issuing from the people eating the smelliest food they could possible lay their hands on for the voyage.

Instead I knit only four rows before someone introduced themselves with the line ‘Hi! What are you knitting?’ before promptly parking their bum next to me and engaging in conversation about knitting, socks, scarves, The North, The South, travel, American sports, premiership football, American vs. British cheese, micro-breweries, stout, visas, the government, pizza, ‘turkey fryers’¹, and museums. This ’single-serving friend’ was the nicest I had ever had the joy to meet on my travels. As we walked through the station together and he apologised for the fact that I never got any knitting done, but this time my knitting served not as a distraction from noise and bustle, but as the opener to a wonderful conversation with a stranger and temporary friendship.

^{1: apparrently turkey fryers are regularly used to cook whole turkeys in the U.S. You can apparently cook an entire bird in 30 minutes and the meat will be tender and moist. I had to Google them to make sure I wasn’t having my leg pulled. My travelling companion found it similarly hard to believe that they are not a common utensil in the U.K.}