It’s taken me a while to find the right pattern – something that I have enough yarn for and that I don’t hate were the only two criteria, but they were surprisingly difficult conditions to fill. Eventually I settled on the ‘Yoke Detail Sweater’ from the Spring/Summer 2009 Debbie Bliss Magazine, and cast on.

A sweater in the process of being recognised as a failure

I didn’t like the rolled stockinette edges, so I replaced those with some mistake rib rows and then knit happily on, checking and re-checking gauge. 24 sts per 4″ – perfect. I am spot on target, knit, knit, knit. Recheck: still 24 perfect stitches per perfects 4″. Perfect, perfect. I just need a perfect 30 rows per perfect 4″ to be perfectly perfect… But I am getting 36.

I don’t know why my row gauge is so off. I’d feel quite confident in adding the extra rows to make up the length, but I know that this will leave me too short on yarn, and as Rowan Soft Baby, in a shade described so aptly by HarleenQuinzel to be “just about the color of glow-in-the-dark stuff when it is not glowing” is long since discontinued, there is pretty much nil chance of me being able to get more.

I feel really quite disheartened, but I suppose it was just not meant to be. Curse my stupid short fat stitches!

UPDATE
The sweater of failure is saved! As you can see in the comments there are apparently still balls of soft baby kicking around. Knit on!

So, with this, we turn to the old adage; “if you want something done properly, do it yourself”. Actually, lets re-write that slightly, to; “if you are going to be so darn picky, do it yourself”. And I did.

Simple polymer clay buttons finish the hat

I had a tiny nub of leftover polymer clay that I have lovingly conserved in and old shoebox full of junk, that I thought was just about perfect in colour to match the yarn I used for my latest hat. It wasn’t. It was too bright, too cool in tone, too lemon. I had to improvise a little as I had no other polymer clay to mix it with, but managed to make do with some ground-down artist’s pastels. I made a few different kinds of buttons to use the tiny bit of polymer clay up, but once they had baked hard I chose these simple elongated trapezoid shaped buttons as I liked the scale of them on the button band, and finally I was satisfied.

I now have closure on my closures.

new knits - the hat without a name

It’s a terrible picture as it is so overcast here today that it is all but night-time, so it doesn’t give the best impression of the colour or stitch definition, but hopefully once the finishing touches have been put towards it there will be ample light for a modelled picture.

Once that is done all that will remain to be done is to write the pattern up and format it, and think of a fitting name.

As someone who so enjoys knitting, the chapter Wool and Water threw up this idea for a new t-shirt:

Alice in Wonderland wool and water t-shirt from www.mrcloud.com

Alice wakes as if from a dream after all her adventures – and all of the characters, sheep included, are perhaps figments of her lucid imagination, but in this design it is the dreamer that is conceived from the mind, and needles, of her companion in the boat. Literally conceived of the sheep as wool from animal coat is spun and wound into balls and used to make a friend, at once of substance and yet imaginary. Details of this t-shirt show that Alice is in fact a knitted doll with buttons for eyes and yarn for hair. On the sheep’s knee sit the tools of his labour – his needles, and yarn spun from his wool.

This Alice in Wonderland t-shirt is available exclusively to ship worldwide from www.mrcloud.com, in pale blue, primrose and chocolate. Why not check out the knitting wooly Mammoth t-shirt, too, if you pop by.

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^{(1) The answer to the obvious question here is One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.}

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.

warm yellow, warm hat

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.

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.

Rescued.

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.

As winter will never end, this will get a lot of use

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.

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…

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.

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.

David Dimbleby telling me STUFF about STUFF

Blocking out the sounds of the rattling train is half the trick

Please bring me my tea or this needle will end up somewhere unfortunate

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….

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.