ZAUBERBALL!

Oh, Zauberball, how do I love thee?  Let me count the ways…  No, too many ways to count.

But wait, there is something even more charming that was also part of the giveaway.  Stephcuddles has recently turned to polymer clay modelling (a love I can understand as it is another favourite past-time of my own) and as part of her blog competition asked entrants to name a favourite animal and fruit/vegetable.  Well, I was never going to say an animal other than monkeys, was I?  And fruit…  Surely there is only one companion fruit that a monkey would even consider…

Monkey and banana stitch markers by Stephcuddles

Can you believe how cute and well-formed these little guys are?  I have been awaiting autumn so that I can cast on for a very special Monkey Scarf with my monkey knitting needles and now these stitch markers will definitely be used for possibly the most monkey-ish project ever to be conceived.

A second ring of the doorbell heralded the arrival of a box I had been awaiting:

yarn

Lots of fresh yarn, ready for dyeing.  I opened up the box and plunged my head in for a few seconds, like one big meatball in a bowl of yarn spaghetti.  Now I have regained my senses I have lots of dyeing to do.  Once I have finished for the day I shall just sit and admire my zauberball for a bit and try to imagine what it should become.  I have decided to wait until I have finished my two current works in progress before casting on any more, and then I think I will be putting Lisa’s Shalimar sock and Stephcuddles’ crazy zauberball forward for two sumptuous and indulgent new projects.

Stephcuddles has a lovely little blog here so do drop by and say hi to her, she’s rather lovely.

Eskimimi Knits yarn

I want to thank everyone who posted words of encouragement and support at giving dyeing a go.  I have worked hard this past week to develop techniques and practices that help me to make the kind of yarns I’d like to be able to buy.

 I have been skeining, winding, dyeing, mixing, heating and designing all hours of the day and night and was up until past midnight last night putting the finishing touches to the yarn, adding ball-bands, etc.  Now that everything has been photographed, checked and re-checked a million times or more, I’m slightly giddy to present to you my little shop

Eskimimi Knits yarn shop (click to visit)

I’ve been trying out all sorts of colours, mixing and blending, dyeing and handpainting, and I am really very pleased with my resulting yarns. I have managed to get the level of saturation I have been looking for, as well as some more subtle blends.  I love colour so very much, so this yarn just ticks all of my boxes. The reason I wanted to dye up some yarn in the first place was because I just couldn’t find the fresh colours that I craved as a knitter.

Selection of yarns I have dyed

It was also a bit of a thrill to see my yarn page on ravelry as I begin to enter the yarns that I have dyed into the Ravelry database, for people to search, discover, and (hopefully) stash:

Eskimimi Knits yarn page on Ravelry

So, I’d now like to declare the Eskimimi Knits yarn shop officially open. I’d appreciate any feedback, thoughts, etc that you might have.  What do you think of the yarn names, colour choices, etc?

It’s so exciting for me that I am in danger of overwhelming you all with pictures, so I’ll limit myself to one last one and not give into the temptation of posting pictures of every single skein of yarn.

Eskimimi Knits hand dyed yarns

I hope that you’ll be able to pop by the shop and have a look around.  And again, thanks to everyone for their encouragement, and thanks to everyone who pops by now and again to read this little blog of mine.

Monkey knitting needles

When a friend who seeks to know you well, even if you are separated by hundreds of miles of ocean and continent, they pick up on the things that make you you.  The needles above have come from the kindest of friends, though we have never ‘met’ who realises that I love monkeys and knitting alike, saw these and realised how much I would love them.  And I do.  They arrived with a beautiful bumper box of bounty which I am sure will all make an appearance on my blog over the next few weeks, bit by bit.

A box of friendship and yarn sent from across the waves

I have received a gift of yarn before, when I hit upon a few hard times and a friend sent me some of her unused stash.  I still have some, because I always thought it too lovely for me to use, and I have been saving it for ‘best’.  I have tried and I have failed to knit this absolutely gorgeous Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn before now, before deciding that whatever I knit wasn’t going to be beautiful enough and re-balling it up for when I was a better knitter:

Cherry Tree Hill - saved for a year for when I can knit 'better'

But, really, I shouldn’t be scared of gorgeous yarns. I have become so entrenched in the ways of buying only what I can afford at the low end of the yarn spectrum that these special yarns seem like an indulgence I do not deserve.  I treat them the same way as I do my food.  When I eat I start with the least appealing, least tasty item on my plate, to ‘get it out of the way’ as it were, to save the most tasty item which I most look forward to until the end, at which point I am inevitably too full to eat it.  What joy can my friends who have sent this beautiful yarn for me to use find if I am scared of it and keep it sealed away?  So, once my £1 a ball Kaffe Fassett socks (even though I do love this cheap and cheerful yarn which seems to be on perpetual sale) are finished I will cast on with something lovely, because friends that have thought ‘Mimi will really enjoy that’ are always right, and sometimes I have loved something too much to think that I am worthy of it.

So, when a friend knows that you love Dick Van Dyke so much that they buy you a Mary Poppins Bert doll for Christmas or when you come home from hospital and your medication makes your skin so sore and tight that they send you some soap that they have hand-made, or when someone shares with you some of their stash because you have none, or when someone gets some powdered drink and thinks ‘I’m sure my friend could put that to some crafty purposes’, or sends you some left-over denim yarn because you are daft enough to want to make a pair of monkey jeans, don’t be scared to enjoy what you have received, because you will smile every time you knit a stitch with a pair of monkey needles, or feel that extra special yarn as it passes over your fingers, or say ‘Hi’ to Bert as you pass by him every morning.

these are a few of my favourite things

Like many of my knitterly friends in the UK,  I was tempted in the Kemps sale of a few months ago to part with some hard-earned electronic money in exchange for some sock yarn by Kaffe Fassett for Regia.  At £1.20 (or thereabouts) per skein it was too bargainous to pass up.

Regia Design line by Kaffe Fassett in 'Landscape: Twilight'

Since first using Regia’s Kaffe Fassett self-striping yarns I have been searching out patterns which employ various ways of using the stripes to create different effects.  The first pair of socks I knit were one of Kaffe’s colourways ‘Zany: Easter’, if I remember rightly, and I knit a very vanilla pair of socks and just let the yarn do exactly what it had been designed to be – be all ‘Kaffe’.

Stockinette socks. Regia Design line by Kaffe Fassett in 'Exotic Colour: Easter'

The next time I turned to this line of yarns for its ‘let me take care of the colour changes for you’ convenience I knitted Lucy Neatby’s Mermaid Socks, which has been re-published in Issue 4 of The Knitter magazine.  This pattern allowed the stripes to become fractured in a stepped spiral down the leg and along the foot to the very tip of the toes.

Mermaid socks. Regia Design line by Kaffe Fassett in 'Exotic Colour: Turquoise'

My most recent Kaffe-a-thon resulted in the extremely involved Harlequilt socks, from Sandy Beadle’s Annetrelac Socks pattern, which this time used and entrelac-in-the-round technique to utilise the stretches of colour in yet another variation of stitch and technique.

Annetrelac Socks. Regia Design line by Kaffe Fassett in 'Exotic Colour: Zany'

I have a few more patterns lined up for future uses of my Kaffe Fassett yarn, each employing the stripes in different and interesting ways, for when I need a diversion from other projects-on-the-go.

Schoppel Wolle Zauberball in 'Little Fox'

This wonderful ball of wild and frnzied colour eventually became my adored Baktus – certainly my most-worn project. I absolutely adored the Zauberball, with its hand-wound appearance and saturated colours. It’s definitely among my favourite ever yarns, but that’s not the yarn I wish to tell you about.

See, when I ordered the Zauberball, the lovely Alison of P2tog did something very, very naughty – she slipped in a small sample (10m or so) of Mini Mochi. That entire day was wasted away just holding the yarn against my cheek and making cooing noises. Some time later I decided I could resist no longer and gave in and treated myself to two balls of the most saturated rainbow shades I could find in her shop.

Crystal palace Mini Mochi yarn in 'Intense rainbow'

I haven’t knit with these two balls of yarn, yet. I’m not yet sure what I hope they will become, but I think perhaps a scarf or small shawlette – something where I can enjoy the softness and warmth around my neck, where I can nuzzle into the ultra-soft fibres and make those soft cooing noises whilst waiting at the bus stop in the hope that nobody hears me.

Click here to see other blogs tagged with knitcroblo7, blogging about this same topic for Knitting and Crochet Blog week. (May take a few hours to update on Google)

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.

I'm going to carry on and embrace the slouch.

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:

take a close look at the very edge of the brim

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…

It may look unassuming, but this ball of yarn is a saviour.

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.

What you need in your life is a bit of  s t  r  e  t   c    h.

"why, these yarn boulders, they feel... different"

On close visual inspection, Regia Stretch yarn looks absolutely no different from the manufacturer’s regular 4-ply sock yarn.  Fortuitously, I had some remnants of non-stretch Regia yarn in exactly the same colourway left over from my Yarr! Boney! mittens for comparison, and upon observtion I could not tell the difference.  The Squish Test proves the differences, though.  The skeins of yarn have obvious extra bounce when you handle them, and picking up a strand to extend and relax it between your fingers immediately helps you to realise that the stretch is in more than just the marketing.

I have completed my first sock in this yarn (more of which soon) and I am happy to report that the qualities that enhance the yarn seem to increase exponentially in the knitting of it.  The small amount of stretch found in the strand results in a generous and comfortable give in the socks – fantastic for when you are making a gift for someone you don’t have exacting foot measurements for.  Though the socks pull on a lot easier (no panic at the point of the heel, wondering if the sock cuff will pass over) they are also more foot-hugging as the elasticity of the yarn contracts to hug the contours of the foot and ankle, helping the socks stay comfortable, and stay up.  No baggy, saggy, ankle pools; no chilling draughts up the trouser leg.

Now, all I need to do is to knit a partner for my lone sock and I will have my very first pair of self-knitted hosiery that I will refuse to part with. Please pass me my needles.

Harlequilt Socks

Behold the Harlequilt Socks, in as highly saturated a combination of colours as Kaffe Fasett ever did conceive.

I am extremely happy with how these entrelac socks have turned out, but I am glad that they are finally complete.  I did feel the project started to drag on a bit after about the fifth entrelac row of each respective sock, and actually found myself counting down until the end of the entrelac portion square by square, seeing the new task of turning the heel as a refreshing new task before sprint-knitting through the rows of stockinette to a short row toe.

Yarn is Regia Kaffe Fassett Design Line Crazy Colour in 'Zany'

This project is my first flirtation with entrelac, and thought the technique is quite engaging, the novelty of picking up stitches for each square wore off after the first sock.  Entrelac is not difficult. If you can knit, purl, decrease and pick up stitches, then you can do entrelac.  Once the foundation row of triangles have been completed, the structure is revealed and you suddenly have an epiphany over the logic of the technique, and it all falls quickly into place.  Entrelac is just stockinette stitch knitted in small blocks.  In this case, very small blocks. Entrelac isn’t time consuming because of complexities of this form of knitting, but because, when working in 6-stitch blocks such as the ones in this pattern,  you have to pick up a stitch for every twelve you knit.  You also have to turn your work every six stitches.  You spend more time turning your work than you do actually knitting, so an ability to knit backwards can be a great time-saver, though if you are like me getting the yarn set up in a position that makes backwards-knitting comfortable takes just as long again…

Finished and matching. I think the effort was worth it.

Despite the time-intensive knitting that I found these socks represented, I do not regret the added effort needed to complete them.  They are probably the brightest and boldest socks that I will ever make, and Craig has been asking over their progression every day or two and declared them to be ‘the best socks I have ever knit’ when I was only a third of the way into the first one.  I started each sock at the same point in the colour progression of the yarn, and I am overjoyed at how well my tension behaved during relaxing knitting sessions in front of the TV in the evenings, through discussions whilst on lunch break and whilst knitting under stress. Each rectangle corresponds perfectly with its partner on the neighbouring sock, matching from the socks of the cuff, through the heel and to the tip of each toe.

 

The yarn threw up some interesting effects, too.  Many of the stripes of this colourway change shade at a distinct and straight line, but at some colour junctions the new shade creeps in, making a wavy, patterned edge as you can see in the stockinette foot portion.  Whilst knitting the socks it started to become apparent that all of the solid colours were lining up at the front of the sock and these intermediate waves of broken colour were all pooling at the back.  What’s more, at the point where my 2×1 ribbing stopped to begin the foundation triangles, the yarn changed to a bright fuschia for the decrease round, before swiftly changing again, which give the impression of a line of little overhand stitches joining the ribbed cuff to the main body of the sock:

yarn and pattern coming together to produce a stitched effect

I didn’t like this at first, but as the lines of rectangles began to build like a patchwork quilt, with the appearance of little ’stitches’ where one colour would show through the decrease stitches that bind each tile to the next, I thought that these little chance quirks that came about because of the union of this particular yarn and this pattern were quite charming, and so suggested the name ‘Harlequilt’.

As last night was the favourite TV night at Monkey Towers (Question Time, followed by This Week, all washed down with a bottle of Blue Nun, or, as it happens, a little Southern Comfort and Coke) I had a couple of hours to go pattern surfing and commit the bamboo tape to a pair of needles and a future as something lovely.

I decided upon a sailors scarf for the springtime – not too bulky around the collar part, but enough in the silky cool bamboo to keep any breeze off of the chest when worn with an open necked cardigan, or something similar.  (How I long for the warmth of days when this is the only required precaution against the occasional intemperate breeze…)

Anyway, the first join between the remnant lengths of yarn was only a few yards into the frankenstein ball I had threaded together, the second occurring about 8 inches into the scarf.  I had no issues when reaching the joined areas where the two lengths of yarn had come together.  I was careful not to tug the two yarns apart as I was approaching the join, but I had fed the new length of yarn a good 4 or 5 inches into the working yarn to ensure that the  join was secure and ran over 8 or so stitches.  Once the first stitch has been made with the ‘doubled’ section of yarn it anchors both the inner and outer yarns together and the join is very secure – much like when you ‘knit in’ a new length of yarn, but with the added security of one strand being inside the other.  It is also makes quite a subtle join:

Close-up view of stitch where 'old' yarn length ends.

The first join is in the narrower neck portion of the scarf, but I’m having a little trouble locating where it is as it is in the seed stitch area making it hard to find, but wherever it is it is well hidden and secure.  A close up view of a row of stitches shows how both yarns are knitted together, one inside the other, negating the need to weave the ends in once the project is finished:

Row of stitches where new and old lengths of yarn are knitted together.

A couple of things I have thought about since joining the yarns and starting the project now strike me as worth noting:

• There is less chance of inadvertently pulling the two lengths of yarn apart before you reach the join if you put the ‘new’ length of yarn inside the old, rather than the other way around
• If the yarn is of an adequately loose weave and you could find a needle that was both fine enough to pass through the weave whilst threaded with the yarn and yet posses an eye that will accommodate the bulk of the yarn, it would negate the need to use a piece of sewing thread to anchor the yarn to the needle (I don’t actually have a needle that will work for in this instance, so that is purely hypothetical.

I’m really enjoying working with the bamboo tape – it behaves very differently in stockinette stitch compared to its properties in moss stitch.  The ‘flat’ construction is all but impossible to discern in stockinette stitch, whereas it is more apparent in the raised edges and bumps of moss stitch.  I don’t feel that my stitches are as evenly formed working with the tape yarn, but I do not dislike the effect.  Some rows seem to have more twist in them, some stand slightly proud of the knitting, but with the slight sheen it almost gives the impression of raw silk.