Good old me

I've been worried by some yarns. I have quite some that are definitely good quality. Kirameki, for example, looks pretty in the ball. It's a tape with little loops, silk/viscose blend. The colour is very deep green, so green that in most pictures it shows as totally black. When knitted, it looks awful. If I used smaller needles (I took the 2mm ones only to stretch the sample, I used 4,5mm) , it would look like the same mess, just denser. My theory that tape yarns look better in skeins has another proof, I'm afraid.
Some yarns seems to have an used washrag somewhere in the pedigree. Nagareha, silk/wook/acrylic/whoknowswhat blend, it's soft, nice for the touch and grey with many very colourful blobs. My great-grandma had a sewing box with a clump of various threads that looked like this. I have no idea why she kept it there, maybe it was frugality to n-th degree because even with the help of the saint patron of seamstresses (whoever might that be) nobody could disentangle it. Whoever might be the saint patron of knitting, let me have some inspiration as of what to do with this yarn. I have four grey skeins and four or five in black which looks a bit better, admittedly.
Katorea is from the same period of the Noro company. Maybe some fashion historian who is better-versed in the subject might explain why at a certain point the look of being dipped in a bucket and dragged across the halfway floor was prevalent. It's the time when Noro used ivory tags instead of black ones, should you want details. This nubbly linen yarn with cotton nubbles came out better than I expected which, I'm afraid, doesn't really mean well. I had low expectations. I however find the yarn somewhat charming - but not enough to use those 9 skeins I have for a sweater. I actually have no idea what garment it could make. One row for texture in plain black sweater is my maximum.
Kiku looks like a cord. Knitted, it looks like a washrag again. I'm a proud owner of one skein so I might keep it as a collection item. Very disappointing yarn. It evokes the '80 to me but I'm too young to remember.
The utmost surprise was this yarn. It is pure linen from Yllet, I bought it in Sweden and it was freaking expensive. At least in my terms. It was lying somewhere around neatly packed in a plastic bag and I just didn't know. In the shop where I got it, they had some samples which were beautiful, that's why I got the yarn. It is however linen, people have horrendous stories about it and it's said to be hard and scratchy. I fished out a skein and made a sample. I started with a 1x1 ribbing since I thought that as a plant fibre, it would lack any springiness. The ribbing had very sculptural quality to it, wool behaves diffferently and cotton just hangs in a boring way. I switched to 2x2 ribbing and to my sheer surprise it wasn't the usual flat-on-two-levels ribbing.... it was undulating, creating ridges and abysses. The yarn is sturdy, almost wirey but by no matter hard or scratchy, it's beautiful for the touch and feels sort of waxy and it's glossy.
I don't really like cables. I can make them in many and tangled ways but it's not the mindless knitting that I prefer for various reasons (basically I let the hands knit and my mind is occupied by something totally different). I however couldn't resist. The yarn just shouted for ribbing. I tried this basketweave pattern (okay, there's wrong crossing. It's only a sample, folks) and it came out totally stunning. There's a problem. I have one skein in black, two in grey and two in white, one of which is somewhere and I have no idea where. I could use a heap of each of the colours for a heap of... something. Something possibly cabled.

Now I need to work a bit but tomorrow there'll be something very stupid presented.

Accomplishments

(1) On Tuesday Mom came. She insisted on buying me some clothes in the local Tesco but I don't go for that crap unless it's the final sale. After three laundry cycles, my fave baby blue top changed into baby blue washrag... you get the point. I asked for washing powder and sunscreen. Due to my allergies to everything, my sunscreen is in the very expensive category and the washing stuff without scents and fabric softeners is the same. And when I'll have lost those ten kilos, I'll have lots of cool Italian clothes to wear anyway.
(3) On Wednesday I had the interview for scholarship to Italy. It went well, the people before me apparently had worse Italian or a tendency to answer questions with one syllable which might well make the same impression. Especially to me, sitting behind upholstered door.
(4) Got a grant. Dunno how much, I asked for 10 000 euros but the mail said that the budgets were cut down for everybody. I don't remember my password for the university files, I'll have to go and ask for a new one. Well done.
(5) Got work.
(6) I compensated getting work by spending some 100 euros on yarn.
(7) Lost some weight despite all the chocolate and poppy cake. Well done.
(8) Hannu's socks:












It's my feet, not those of Hannu. I just don't shave my legs too often since I've stopped going to dance classes.
(9) I finally called the photography supplies place and ordered my macro lens.

I noticed I skipped point two.
(2) The Rug. Felted, needs ironing.

Spring has come

On Wednesday I had some errands - like, find a notary, get a certified copy of my diploma, throw it at some people at school, take pics of the whale skeleton in the National Museum, get a copy of FAZ since it's mentioned in some historic something in my book and the editor expressed a desire to add a pic of Frankfurter Allgemeine there. It's a good paper, if nothing else, and since the kids don't know German and... and anyway, even if it could be interpreted as a subliminal message, it won't do more harm than the idiotic advert made by some advertising idiot, where the Lindt chocolate names are French yet pronounced in English. Well, I was messing around Prague.
I forgot to take my allergy meds. The Prague air is very, erm, strong, so I had my first fit of cough just after getting out from the metro. I usually carry an inhaler somewhere in my bag but just that day I forgot it at home. Meaning that after every fit of cough I had to sit and concentrate on breathing because the body somehow wouldn't want. Like, really, stupidly, inhale-exhale. Inhale-exhale. Try not make that whistling sound. It worked somehow. I hate my allergies.
Although the nights are still frosty, it's sunny and nice. On Wednesday it was even snowing (the third time during this bad excuse for winter). Yet, in general, the weather is rather springy and warm. I didn't feel like wearing my winter jacket, it gives me the trickle of sweat running down my spine which I dearly hate. I fished my sample wardrobe for something warm and I fished out one of the first sweaters I made, with pretty strange design mistakes I had hard time fixing and/or ignoring, I was much less self-confident, I suppose. It's a bulletproof wool, almost, and I've been wearing it third day in a row. And... I love it. It keeps me warm, it has lace pattern so it's well aerated (I sweat a lot), it has a nice shape (will have to start using some design elements again) and it looks good. And... it's cheap superwash wool.
Some more yarn arrived. Of which there were 20 skeins of cashmere/silk/lambswool blend which is stunning to knit (softer than butter) but brown. I tried to call it earthy, hazelnut, whatever.... but it's brown. When knitted in plain stockinette, it looks like cheap sweatpants. I wonder whether I should dare and redye it. I thought I might combine it with some Aurora and Blossom and Surabu in shades of (mostly) green; made a sample and Surabu looks pretty useless as carryalong, it makes the whole thing bulky and scratchy. I'll have to think about it. And the yarn is really brown, not bluegrey as on the pic. The colourful bits is Surabu. I noticed that it has z-twist which is way unusual... and seems to me that the stitches look more symmetrical. I tried some leaves pattern but it doesn't seem the right one. And the yarn is way too beautiful to be wasted.

Postal odyssey, part II.

Today I had a headache. It shifted from my neck solely to my head and did its best to become worse as the day went by.

I went to the post office with the customs storage. It's at the other end of the city which makes it a nice trip or at least would make it a nice trip if my legs weren't too heavy to lift and my head wasn't trying to explode upon every faster move of my upper body.
The post office is ugly, there's the canteen for employees and they served sour cabbage today because the whole building smelled of sour cabbage. Yuck. I found the right office, the lady told me straight away They didn't let you know that you were to pick your mail, did some stamping and stickering and I got my yarn. Lovely yarn, for that matter and you'll get a pic when the batteries are recharged. Unless my head explodes before that.

The other job was to buy mohair yarn - I did some stupidly stupid calculating mistake: one 50g ball of yarn A has 55m, one ball of yarn B has 166m, I used up ten of the former, four of the latter will suffice for the same project. In reality, yarn A was 110m/50g meaning that actually I needed over a kilometre and yarn B comes in 100g balls so I would need not four but eight or so. Obviously, they didn't have the yarn I needed anymore. Not in another shop, not in the storehouse, never more. I had to fish something suitable which is mohair/acrylic blend and I should wind it into long skeins (walk that kilometre between two chairs, basically) and dye it grey, burgundy and green but I cannot move. I wonder whether I could knit the sweater and paint the stripes onto it later. It should work. It will work.
And, the yarn is in a 1.4kg cone.

I have a terrible headache, did I mention it? When I jumped up because I remembered that I forgot about the rice I was making, it tried to kill me. I tried to calm down - it doesn't hurt when I don't move, it jsut feels tense, then, but it didn't work for quite a while so I jumped around holding my head as if badly mimicking the Munch guy.
Now, I'm moving around only if I really have to, like, to bring coffee or the remote control. I have to move slowly so to a random observer it might seem that I move immersed in jelly.
Imagining that I just moved today's work to tomorrow and that I have to pick some people at the bus station and take them to the dorms (two hours on public transport), I feel like going and killing myself. Sigh.

Just so

I started knitting the black silk sweater around two weeks ago thinking that I'd jsut leave it plain black, there are the little colourful blobs in the yarn anyway but then I got an Idea. That I'll embellish it with the single orphan skein of Tsubaki in blues and pinks. I knit on the train where I discovered that I have only one needle and for my basic sweater I need basically two. It can be done with one but with a bit of difficulties - you need to squeeze two armspans on one needle, in this case 80cm. The stranded part could be done on one only too, but I invested 40 cowrie shells into another 5mm circular (made of undefined grey matter), 5mm is my usual size anyway. I adapted one motif from Stickmönster på Öland and added the frame around it to have a well-defined stripe.
The problem showed when the wonderful light blue changed to dark blue and then into purple. Just way too many colours - and the yarn has pink and a length of green and some teal, too. I ended up with clipping the yarn and joining only the light blue pieces as much as possible - I was too lazy to rip the dark blue at the beginning, bad enough that two rows with purple had to go. But the result is satisfactory although I don't have yarn enough for the solid blue stripe I wanted to make at the back part. It doesn't matter that much, though. I named the pattern Faraway bride, there's something sentimental about it. One day I might even write it down.
The other piece of yarn porn is mohair blend I dyed for one exchange sweater. Just so.




We're having presidential elections these days. The parliament is arguing how to vote.
When we had the parliament elections, it was a draw and the guys were arguing who would be in the government so we were without any for seven months. The state budget of that year was far the best in the last 10 or so years. One wonders what's the politicians good for.
I'm still laptopless - the cable is at home II. so the battery is out. And will be for a while. So, since I don't remember my passwords, I cannot log on to my places and I cannot waste time chatting and such... and I can go home from office, Mommy is making roasted ribs.

Action!

I dyed some yarns. Quite some yarns.
I also messed some but it's nothing that couldn't be fixed. It came out of the washing machine pretty tangled - sure, I tie the hanks (one untied itself, the knot stayed, though. It has to be some perverted topology) and I even knot them so that they don't come out of the washing machine as one terrible mess. Today they were particularly evil because they even unknotted themselves.
Note to self: silk takes the cotton dye. That explains why the green and purple guts look like guts, not like pretty tweedy yarn. I'll redye it but it sucks.
The wool/cotton blend worked better although the purple and turquoise yarn has no flair.
The wet mohair looks like dead dog but that's the usual habit of wet mohair. Although I know it, it's pretty unnerving.
No redyeing tomorrow, I have an exam to pass.

Uninspired

I got another yarn, obviously. It's brown with golden highlights and it's wonderful but for the colour. I hate brown. It looked grey on the website. I thought I would match it to the grey one I already had and the combination doesn't look that absolutely bad... but it's so plain that it's killing me. So I took the Florence book in order to find some inspiration and I'll be dyeing. What and how I don't know yet, though.
I was out for a lunch with Sanna yesterday. We talked about my taking care for the foreign students, I told her how some even don't bother to answer mails and things, such as one guy we both know and she was so surprised that I'm in charge of him, she exclaimed that she had thought I was only harassing him. As if my only life's goal was to rape any Finn in the city. Sigh.
I got a mail from a friend that she's sort of recovering from breast cancer. I hadn't heard form her for some time and I guessed she was busy with research or something. Sigh again. I'll knit her a cap with reindeer or something.

Finally!

I have the USB cable. So I can not only make pics but also show them. And make my blog colourful and interesting and crap.
So, let me introduce you Siri. One of the shelter kitties. She now lives under my bed. Then there's Dellie behind the fridge and Dahlia somewhere around (or what the hell their names are and which is which). And.... Siri is a yarn thief. I'll have to cover my stash box - I bought that thing in Ikea quite a few months ago but for whatever the reason I didn't assemble it and I kept my yarn in bags and boxes. Now it's all in this box, decoratively arranged and.. accessible.
I was to a knitting workshop on Saturday. To see people, to learn entrelac (didn't finish that sample), to boast with my handpaints - on Friday I dyed some angora, for example, and definitely not to buy any yarn, I have lots of it. So I got this:

The gray one is the silk yarn... I put my silk sweater in a knitting contest and won the yarn used for the product and I gathered it at the ocassion since the lady who organized the workshop owns an internet store.... and the dark stuff is helluva expensive mohair blend which I saw on the website and I thiught that it might be interesting weren't it that expensive. It looks sort of muddy on the pics but it is speckled in blue and purple and orange and gray-green and it's lovely. And expensive. I spent all money I took with me just in case I met something irresistible. Bad, bad me.
The workshop took place in a local cultural centre or what the hell it was and one of the rooms looked..... you know, it was full of packs of yarn. So I simply got poisoned by wool fumes. I couldn't do anything about it, you see, it was an accident. So now I have not 30 but 30.5 kilos of yarn and I'm not eating until the end of the month.
The workshop was cool. Not that I hadn't known that there's many knitters somewhere around but I hadn't met any. It felt nice there. It's always nice to be in company of people who share the same obsession.

I'm changing into a maniac.

After having ordered four kilos of sock yarn (bad, bad me), Minna showed me this link . The very first pair of socks is ab-so-lu-te-ly wonderful. There aren't any charts for colours on the site.... but that doesn't matter. I can invent some other landscape with birches....

Hot new news

Apart for the possibility of getting a research grant from the university (someone decided to be generous, the upper limit is like 11 000 euros) , meaning that I might get the money to go to Italy to see some pics and books, nothing extraordinary is happening. I finished my rainbow scarf, I go to school ocassionally, I write the thesis, version 2.0, I started translating Ripa again, it sucks, yesterday I got some material help in form of CDs, candies and knitting patterns (thanx, Sandy and Minna) and finally went to buy a cushion for my kitchen chair I use for sitting at the comp.
I'll take pics of things I've done as soon as I lure someone with a camera to my vinegar den.
I promised some shaded yarn to Minna. It didn't come out as shaded as I expected, since I don't have the dyeing pot, I cannot fix it with vapour and seems that oven doesn't work that well so I simply boiled it in some light blue to saturate the colors a bit. When I took it out of the pot, it looked terribly dark but most of the stuff does so I have to wait until it dries. That's the worst time of the process, expecting the results.
I bought four kilos of sock yarn. I swore that I'm not going to buy any new yarn until I knit half of the stuff I have (okay, until I start knitting. I usually have several unfinished projects at a time) or unless there's some heartbreaking sale. And sock yarn per seven euros per kilo, a price for which I'd get one skein normally, is totally irresistible. I wanted to get some sock yarn anyway, for the christmas socks and everything was just expensive.. but for this.
I named the kitten Apricot and if everything goes ok, i'll get rid of her today.

On the road

We went for another trip with the students. In the morning there was such a mist that i had problems finding the departure spot.
Anyhow, the sky cleared and around noon, the daz was ideal for adverts for beauty of autumn.
I was knitting on the board, yesterday I got a discounted microfibre yarn (torn tags, nothing worse) so I started working on Sandy's scarf. Now I have a nice piece full of badly hidden mistakes but the general look is ok.

I'll write some more but i'm helluva tired and need to get up very early tomorrow....

...some more

I was off to my parents' for a weekend. well, from Sunday up till now. On Saturday I was off for a trip with the students. Parents were in the middle of some sort of continuous argument or whatever they might call their relationship, starting that dad convinced my mom to go to some sort of car races on Sunday and when she said yeah, ok, I have never been to such an event, he started asking whether she really wants to go in such style that she felt she wouldn't be too welcome. So when I arrived, we went for a walk and talked stupidities and she said that they decided to go somewhere warm for christmas, that they deserve, especially she, some sort of nice cool Christmas without any cleaning and forced socializing. She wants to go to Reunion, basically.. and Dad insists on New Zealand stopping in Sydney for some time. So there'll be a bit of fun, I guess. And no trip after all, with quite a probability:-)
I browsed the local yarn stores and got the Nuvola. For the revenge socks and for some more projects.
Tähti is sitting on my lap now, not wanting me to go away and Red is still quite full of fleas... they haven't killed each other when I was gone - good.

And now about something totally normal.

The upper part of the white sweater. should you be interested how to make it, I don't have much idea. It has to be cast on in two pieces (one sleeve, back part of the neckline, other sleeve, front part) and somehow kept together for soemthing like three rows when it's knit together. It sucks, I couldn't get longer circulars than 100 cm and because even those cost money, I got one and then used an 80cm and a 60cm (this one was a size larger, i. e. 6, because i knit tighter). Apart from the usual topology problems (tangling the cast on part in many impossible ways) I had to carefully plan because of changing the needeles. Four would be optimal. Anyhow, three rows are knit from the top and then you take two needles and knit one stitch to one, one to another to form sleeves and the 'seam' will be on the upper edge as well as on the lower. Of course that the area under the opening for the neck is separate from the beginning so it's all knit on its relative needle. When the sleeves are wide enough, the opposite happens - you knit from two needles to one up to armpits. Then the magic part comes: from one side you knit round the body and return to the end of the sleeve, then the same from the other sleeve, resulting in two rows on the sleeves from their relative balls and one on the body from each ball. Then cast off on the sleeves and go round and round.
I like knitting in one piece. In all impossible ways. I hate stitching the pieces together. When the thing is all knitted together, it's much neater and more interesting.
(Yes, this piece is full of knitting mistakes as well.)

Crap. New and improved!

Apart from working, I went shopping. I wanted to get, among others, some nice notebook for putting down my inventions in graphics. I aimed for a nice stationery (choice of small handy notebooks: bad, maybe the place used to be nicer and better supplied) and next door, there is a shop with sewing stuff, yarn, cheap clothes and whatever. Out of sheer curiosity, I went to peek in and discovered this:















See the tag. merino, alpaca, mohair, mostly. No manufacturer on the tag, but the price, 51 czk as seen on the orange side of the tag... well, you can get pure acrylic for it. Maybe it's a factory run by some drug trader as an activity to cover up the real business. That would explain the incredible price. I dug ten balls out of the shelf. Half a kilo. It could make a nice cloudy sweater if I use thick needles. After all, when getting fed up with my 3.5 size needles sweater, I proclaimed that I'm not using anything thinner than my fingers:-). On 6 mm it goes ok, I knit the sample when drunk (in the evening, we were out of wine and drank port). I asked the shop assistant whether they have some more somewhere in storage. She said Of course but I wasn't sure whether she got my question and if she did, shether she wouldn't say Of course just of pure habit. So I'd rather limit myself to those ten balls. But - I'll dye them first. Something opalizing in pastel colours to match the name.

My tree sweater is doing well. Yesterday we were chatting with mom and I was knitting - produced well 10cm of the sleeve and it's near end. Started to make the stitches tighter - my purl is quite loose and when attaching the sleeve, I forgot to turn the thing upside down... so I had to pull the yarn. And - I should have done it long before because it looks sooo nice....
I'm expecting a load of this yarn, I think I ordered a kilo (or two? I ordered a damn lot of something and don't remember what it was...) and now I just need to send Mom away for a weekend to do my dyeing in peace.

leftovers

Passed another exam marked Non-European art. Japanese in my case, everything of it sucks but for whatever the reason, I have a bit better attitude to Japanese stuff than, say, Mexican. I managed somehow with quite a good result, in fact I supposed that the guy would let me pass out of sheer compassion...


Should you be interested how my knitting goes, the thick winter jumper rests in the wardrobe and will remain there, now I work on the silk thing. s it showed, it sort of grew (no idea how) to be too wide for a tank top. So I decided that stump a base for a nice silk sweater and the plain cable was substituted by a tree pattern. I have a idea how to do the upper part but i have no idea how will that look like. Some people say that I'm chaotic. I am.
To take the pic (see, it's going ok!) I had to clean up half of the kitchen (the other half is furniture) and as it goes, the self-proclaimed queen of the house somehow appeared in the pic and then mysteriously was back in the armchair in another room. The mag on the right, with the black and white pic, it's a pet extra of Russian Vogue. Irresistible, although it cost me a fortune... But I'm a good girl.

A friend is going to move to my place sometime next week. Linda, the red-haired from my birthday party pics:-). Her flatmate/landlady left for two months plus and left her in the middle of an apartment.. or rather a construction site with one decent room of three, adding that she should pay the whole rent and find some flatmates or something and take care about the construction works. So she desperately asked for help and as there's no-one for the summer, i'll have some company. And fun. Expect some party entry around next week.

I have to share this.

100% silk yarn. For 27 CZK per ball. Which means some funny 540CZK per kilo. Or 20euros, if not less. It's undyed so I'll see to it and make somthing totally cool.
Note also the other contents of my table. typical intellectual mess. The folio on the upper left is a diy copy of first volume of Imagines Sanctae Birgittae by Aili and Svanberg, the basic thing to start with my thesis. An Arvo Pärt CD. Never met anyone who would fit into the general idea of normal person and listen to Arvo Pärt. The steel thing on upper right is bookweight (based on the example of paperweight; designed to keep books open and nt floating around in the wind) by Sagaform. One of the coolest things I have. Most of my space is covered by such a mixture of odd objects and mess is my natural habitat.
Meantime, I went voting, created my birthday cake (I'd never say how difficult it is to get the birthday candles - those thin, small ones....) and it's great. There should be some details done more neatly but I'm no professsional cook so I can dare for a minimal imperfection. However, I cook good. Just to warn some random guys: it doesn't mean at all that I'm a housekeeper, no, thank you. I'm an artist.