Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

I have been wearing the hat of much blue-ness over the last few days, every time I have popped out on errands, piling what might otherwise be messy hair inside and out of sight. Ah, hats, the lazy/busy person’s friend.

I don’t know if I like the colour, still, but I can appreciate that I don’t look terrible in it. I appreciate all of the comments saying that it compliments my eyes. I am actually quite surprised. A child of the 80s, all of the received wisdom of my youth insisted that you should never wear blue eyeshadow with blue eyes (not that I wanted to wear blue make-up) and somehow I assumed that blue was a general no-no with my colouring.

After my last post, I decided to Google around and refresh myself on the current wisdom surrounding colour analysis. Now, I don’t generally care what colours someone suggests I should wear, as I generally wear any colour (except blue ), but the results were interesting. According to this resource I am a winter (which is what I had assumed) under the subset ‘clear winter’, and these are the suggested colours:

A few of the fuschias and the brighter purple I just do not like, but on the bottom row, second from the right, is my hat.  Some of my favourite colours are definitely missing – I love sage and lime greens, dusky pinks and various other colours, which I will of course still wear, and I’m also hoping that I don’t look awful in the new hat that I am writing a pattern for, in honey yellow.

I guess the obvious thing is to wear the colours you enjoy, but try new things from time to time, even if you end up throwing them off in disgust in the fitting room.

So, the continuing saga of the Blue Winter hat…

Yesterday, I bundled the hat into a box containing a few items such as my camera, etc, and hid it away in my suitcase. When looking through this same box this morning the hat was gone. Did I not love it enough, causing the knitting gnomes to steal it away as I slept? Cue increasing hurried and desperate attempts to locate missing knitwear for nearly two hours until it turned up under a box in the wardrobe.

The sweet relief of finding the hat again after such a scare of course means that I love this hat more than anything, because I couldn’t bare to lose something that took me so long to make. I don’t know how well the blue colour suits me, yet. Blue is just a colour that doesn’t seem to feature in my wardrobe, so I am slightly uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity of the tone of this otherwise beautiful chapeau, so this may well turn into a gift in the future. I’m just not sure if the colour suits me yet.

The hat is finally complete! Complete and out of sight. Buried, in a box. A box in my suitcase. And why do I want the hat out of my sight for a little while? Let me recap a paragraph from yesterday’s blog post:

Secondly, I have never knit a slouchy hat, and I keep worrying at the prodigious length that this hat has reached already. I can put the hat on, draw the needle through and cinch the top, and it fits fine – but I am going to press on with the remaining one and a half repeats of the charted pattern, because I’d like to add a new shaped hat to my winter wardrobe.

Six repeats of the chart did seem to make an awfully long hat, but I liked the pictures of other people’s finished projects so much that I wanted one that fit the same. remember that little problem I had with reading the ball meterage a few days ago? I can’t read the number of chart repeats, either. As I was pulling the finishing thread through the last 11 stitches to close the top of the hat (another disaster occurred here, more of which later) I suddenly saw the phrase ‘repeat charted pattern 5 times glaring out at me. I am such a dolt. What’ more I then last 5 of those last 11 stitches slip off the needle without knowing, and unravel by about 7 rows as I pulled the final stitches shut.

I could have unravelled to the end of the fifth repeat and started knitting the decreases again, but I was too agitated and fed up by then, so I picked the stitches up, closed the top and hid it from sight.

It’s such a lovely pattern, I am angry that I screwed so many simple things up. I am hiding it away so I can forget about the frustrations in knitting it and maybe love it when I ‘discover’ it again in a few weeks. Oh, and if it weren’t for that extra pattern repeat I would have had enough yarn to have not needed the third ball of dye-lot discrepancy evil.

The Blue Winter hat is gathering pace as it approaches the finishing post.  Despite being a nice, simple hat, this project represents a few minor firsts for me.  For a start, I never knit with, or wear, blue.  So, why did I buy this yarn?  It was really cheap in a local closing down sale

Secondly, I have never knit a slouchy hat, and I keep worrying at the prodigious length that this hat has reached already.  I can put the hat on, draw the needle through and cinch the top, and it fits fine – but I am going to press on with the remaining one and a half repeats of the charted pattern, because I’d like to add a new shaped hat to my winter wardrobe.

Thirdly, twisted stitches – how have I just discovered thee?  Well, that’s not quite accurate – I knew that they existed and the thinking behind them, but have never before used them.  I wonder how they compare in look, function and ease of completion with simple 2 stitch cables, made without a cable needle?  If I have any remnants from the project and experiment may be in order.

I’ve knit with Rowan Pure Wool Dk several times before, and always found it a nice, basic yarn, but I do seem to have a lot of problems with pilling as I knit.  Though it seems to wear pretty well,  I often find fuzzy bits working their way off of the yarn before I even reach them with my needle, and a close-up detail of the brim shows the slight problem:

So, that’ll be one for the old clothes de-fuzzer once it’s complete.

I’m looking forward to getting this finished and piling all of my hair inside it on bad hair days (sure to be especially frequent during the blustery March ahead).  Let’s just hope that blue doesn’t look terrible on me…

There is very little I dislike more than the apparent joys of travel. I hate packing bags, forgetting important things, lifting, pulling or otherwise mobilising heavy luggage amassed mostly of completely pointless and bulky objects. I dislike being without my home comforts and the things people, and places that make me happy.

So, as my train finds its way at an increasing distance from Lancaster, my heart is not exactly filled with joy at my delayed, busy journey – a journey of which the horrors should have been cushioned a little at the promise of a free at-seat service offering tea and coffee which has unsurprisingly yet to materialise, but there are a few things that do help to make the experience at least a little more bearable.

Firstly, iPlayer. Auntie’s greatest gift to the busy and the disorganised, and the traveller at large. Having the foresight to expect the chattering removed company of angry, delayed people, I downloaded a couple of episodes of some of my favourite shows so I can immerse myself in the bubble of David Dimbledore’s journey through the seven ages of Great Britain.

Secondly, audiobooks. I have about 40 on my iPod, and though I am currently a short way into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for this journey I am listening to Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, mostly because I love the slight sneer in his voice when I am stuck in a carriage with broken air conditioning, whilst the train ‘rests’ at an embankment for 20 minutes without explanation as to why our ETA is moving so far into the future that I’m going to have to call up Marty McFly to bring me back home.

And lastly, my sticks and string.

What better time to whip out your needles and wool than whilst you have (at least) three hours (and counting – seriously, how delayed is this train?) of uninterrupted knitting, with nothing to distract you, or demand your attention. I can sit back in my seat, iPod or iPlayer for company and entertainment, with stitch after relaxing stitch building from one needle to the next.

So, as I recline backwards into this window-side view and watch the rolling grassy vista of the English countryside drift by, past the sunlit hills of this green and pleasant land, the business and chatter can slowly melt away and I can just enjoy the gentle, silent rhythm of needles and wool.

Someone had seriously better start thinking of bringing me a cup of tea soon, though, otherwise I’m going to kick-off….

Emergency yarn from the Bay of E has arrived.

I couldn’t source a ball from the same dye-lot as the two I was originally knitting the hat with, and this salvage skein is significantly different in tone, hue and saturation from the original, and even the sheen of the yarn is different.  The blue of the eBay purchase has a yellow undertone and just doesn’t have the saturation of the yarn I had bought in the Bluebird Beads closing sale, but as I am loathe to undo all of my knitting, I am going to try to slowly eek in the new shade a few lines at a time to get it to blend from one shade to another in a slow transition, even if I can’t make the difference disappear altogether.

Lesson learned.

‘The time has come’, Eskimimi said,
‘To think of other things:
Of hats and wool and stitch patterns
And whether you’ve actually checked the ball-band correctly to see if you have enough yarn to finish what you are knitting”.

Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I admit that I have made a mistake.  A stupid, basic, knitting noob mistake.  I present to you exhibit A.  The ball band from a skein of Rowan Pure Wool DK yarn.  Please observe where it says there are 175m per ball:

Sorry? Let me check… Yes, your honour, you’re right.  I don’t know why I thought that two was a seven.  Yes, yes, each ball is 50m shorter than I had thought.  

To further my case for the defence I would suggest that I was perhaps distracted into misreading the lenght length by the mis-spelling on the ball-band, which clearly draws the eye away from the numerical values.  No, no, wait!  I’m not guilty!

They say that there is no such thing as a victimless crime, and weeping in the stands we find the beautiful Golden Autumn hat, by the beautiful and talented Lucy Sweetland of A Black Pepper.

Yes, your honour, I am ready for my sentence.

A 2-4 day wait and a fine of £4.70, plus some possible inconsistencies in dye-lot?  Community service to be performed at the Bay of E?  Nooooooooo!

I decided that it was about time that I made a pair of socks that I will refuse to give away. As most past socks have been adopted by Craig, and knowing that no colour scares him, I have had to change tactics. Lace is the new weapon in my armoury, because though he may be open to wearing the kind of colours that were once only visible to those who believed they cold ’see the music’, I think lace might just be a bit too feminine for him, even in a dark grey yarn reminiscent of school uniforms and road surfaces.

This is the first of my new pair of Sleepy Hollow Socks, made with the fabulous Regia Stretch yarn. One sock down and one to go, I couldn’t resist a little test fitting yesterday, to make sure they hugged my foot properly and were appropriately comfortable. After acknowledging that they ticked both these boxes and readying myself for the second sock, I spent a considerable amount of time looking for the initial sock before giving up in the belief that ‘it couldn’t have gone far’.

Of course, I found it when I was getting ready for bed last night, when I removed it from my foot, completely forgetting that I was wearing it. I think I’ll chalk the sock up as ‘definitely comfortable’.