Cygnus Cowl – A Swan-inspired Accessory

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Hello dear fellow knitters, nature lovers and other readers.

Today’s blogpost is again part of my effort to keep at least this little corner of the world as normal and uplifting as possible. So here is my Cygnus Cowl, the new knitting design I’ve been working on for about four months. I’m not a quick designer. I like to sketch & swatch and test & tweak until every detail is just right.

As I told you last week, it was inspired by one of the inhabitants of the reedlands close to our home – Cygnus olor, better known as the mute swan. Here it is, sailing along regally in a still wintry landscape.

Mute swans can produce a weak trumpeting sound, and hiss when provoked, but are mostly silent. Hence their name. I know that they can be aggressive, but from a safe distance they look like fairy tale creatures.

In Dutch they are called knobbelzwaan, for the black knobbel (knob) at the base of their bill. They are fairly common around here. Do they live in your part of the world too?

I have photographed them in different seasons. In June last year, I spotted a nesting pair through some reeds.

And on a sunny summer’s day, I took this picture:

I asked the swan to please pull up its leg, because it looked silly with its foot sticking out from between its feathers. But it refused to oblige.

Now, a little more about the cowl. You’ve already seen it at the top of this post, and here’s another picture, with the model’s hair tucked inside to show it in its entirety:

And this is what it looks like from the back:

The lovely model is our daughter, and I’ve designed the Cygnus Cowl with her in mind.

The yarn I used is Rowan ‘Brushed Fleece’, a bulky wool and alpaca blend. Two balls of 50 grams each are enough for the cowl and several swatches. It already feels nice on the ball, but after soaking and drying it is as soft as swan’s down.

The cowl consists of two parts. First there is the cowl body, knit in an all-over cable pattern resembling rippling water:

And then there is a long swan’s wing feather, knit separately.

Here the Cygnus Cowl is laid out flat. It has a narrow indentation on one side and the feather is wrapped around it later. White is hard to photograph – I hope you can see the details clearly:

It isn’t a beginner’s knit, but for a slightly more experienced knitter it is totally doable. I’ve explained the cables and several other knitting techniques in the pattern. And the description of how the cowl is finished is accompanied by photos.

The above pictures were taken indoors. It was early March and our plan was to take lots of photos outside, but the weather was uncooperative. It was a cold, blustery, rainy day. Here’s an impression of our outdoor photo shoot.

Raindrops on the lens and icy hands made it hard to take clear pictures. There were puddles everywhere and the ground was muddy. The wind tugged hard at our daughters red cape (a thrift-shop bargain made with cashmere, squeee!)…

… and made her hair fly all over the place.

In the end we found a sheltered spot behind a reed-roofed barn, but by that time my model/daughter was chilled to the bone. And how to get onto firmer ground again without sliding into the mud?

We had to work fast, and fortunately ended up with enough usable pictures. And in spite of the unpleasant circumstances we had a lot of fun.

I realize that white isn’t for everybody. If white doesn’t suit you but you like the design, why not make it in the colour of your own favourite bird – flamingo pink, raven black, dove grey, owl brown or teal blue?

You can find the Cygnus Cowl pattern here on Ravelry.

As always, thank you for reading. Please take care and stay healthy!

Reed

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Hello, and an extra warm welcome today! I sincerely hope that you are in good health and able to cope with life’s stresses in this strange and scary world we suddenly find ourselves in. And I also hope that you get all the support you need if you have health problems or are struggling with this new reality in any way.

I’ve been wondering what to do, here on my blog. I had planned to write about the area where I found the inspiration for a new knitting design, but it all felt rather futile under the circumstances. I could write about how the pandemic impacts everyday life here, in the Netherlands, instead. But how would that help?

After giving it some more thought, I’ve decided to stick to my original plan. I’m not a doctor, nurse or other healthcare professional. I can’t help anybody in that way. What I hope I can do, is offer some comfort, inspiration and cheer through my words, pictures and knitting. A breath of fresh air for everybody cooped up at home and something different for worried minds to focus on.

Would you like to join me on a short virtual tour of ‘our’ wetland?

We have the great good fortune to live close to two National Parks. To the North-East there’s a large area of woodland and heath. (For my regular readers: that’s where the flocks of sheep live.) And to the South-West there’s a wetland area.

This is, in fact, the largest lowland bog in Northwest Europe. It is ideal for cycling – there are miles of bicycle tracks and meandering narrow roads.

At this time of year, this open landscape can be rather bleak, with chilly winds. But one cloudy and windy day, about a fortnight ago, I braved the elements and took some photographs.

In summer the area is overrun by tourists from all over the world. Normally there would be some shivery visitors around taking selfies even in March, but now, with Covid-19 forcing them to stay at home, it is deserted.

The canoes and the soundless ‘whisperboats’ are waiting for busier times.

I could tell you about the picturesque villages, the crocheted curtains behind many windows, the various types of windmills, or the birds, flowers and butterflies, but I’m keeping all that for later. Today, I’ll focus on the landscape, and especially on reed.

Apart from lakes, canals and wet grasslands, there are extensive reedlands, often right behind the houses.

Mowing takes place in winter, and in March much of the reed has already been mown (right half of photo below). The rest will follow soon or is left as it is for the birds and other wildlife.

A statue in one of the villages shows a traditional reed worker taking a break.

Nowadays, the work is done with modern motor mowers. Then the reed is tied into bundles and stacked along a waterway…

… or in the corner of a field and covered with plastic sheeting…

… to be collected with a tractor and trailer or transported over water on a flat boat:

Not surprisingly, many houses around here have reed roofs. The oldest thatched houses are very small – tiny houses avant la lettre.

Most of these are now rented out as holiday cottages. On the outside they look exactly like they did 100 years ago, and they do still have an original bedstee (a bed inside a sort of cupboard), but otherwise they have all mod cons.

There are also some fairly modest new houses with reed roofs…

… as well as more luxurious ones:

Although I’m happy with our own house, and wouldn’t want to move at all, I always love looking at other people’s houses, especially if they’re as lovely as these.

I did say that I wouldn’t talk about birds today, but I just have to show you these storks I saw on a nest:

Many people around here provide storks with nesting places in the form of wagon wheels placed on high poles, or on a dead tree as here.

Just as I was heading home, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds. Standing in the nippy wind, looking out over the shimmering water surface, with a couple of graylag geese in the foreground, a cormorant primping its feathers a little further away, and the sound of other water birds in the distance… a moment of bliss.

One of the inhabitants of this reedland (not in this photo) formed the inspiration for my new knitting pattern. I’m busy finishing everything and hope to tell you more about it soon. For now, take care and stay well!

Oh, and if you’d like to read more about this National Park, do visit the official website.

Finishing Willapa

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Hello! Today it’s all about knitting (and some music). I’m sorry to disappoint the non-knitters among you – I promise to write about something of more general interest next time.

I had been feeling a bit off-colour for several days, but struggled on until I thought, ‘Enough is enough’ and gave myself an afternoon off. I brewed a pot of tea, put on some music and spread an unfinished knitting project and everything I needed to finish it out on the dining table.

Do you remember me writing about UFOs and my New Year’s resolution to finish (or frog) them all? Well, this the first one. It is a cardigan called Willapa that was designed by Annie Rowden for Brooklyn Tweed. This is the front page of the pattern with a ball of the yarn I used:

I would have liked to make it from the original yarn, Brooklyn Tweed ‘Loft’, but the only shop in our country stocking that had run out of my colour choices A, B and C. I chose Lamana ‘Como Tweed’ instead. The yarns are similar, but not the same. They are both fingering weights, both tweedy, and both knit up to the same gauge. But Loft is more rustic and has (imho) more interesting colours, while Como Tweed is airier and softer.

So, why did this cardi become a UFO? I’m not entirely sure.

It was almost finished, but very soon after I’d started the front border, the frog chorus started to chant ‘Rip-it, Rip-it’.

The pattern said ‘slip the first stitch PURLWISE with yarn held in back’, while I would have chosen ‘slip the first stitch KNITWISE with yarn held in back’. I had my doubts, but thought, ‘How much difference can it make whether you slip a stitch purlwise or knitwise?’

So, I ignored the frogs and knit on. And on and on. It wasn’t until it was time to bind off that I decided I wasn’t happy with the edge stitches at all. They were different on the left and right and looked untidy.

But before I followed the frogs’ advice and ripped out many hours of knitting, I knit a swatch to check if slipping the first stitch knitwise would really be better than to slip it purlwise:

Yes, it did make quite a difference. The bottom half (A) of the swatch was knit slipping the first stitch of every row purlwise, the top half (B) slipping them knitwise.

Slipping the first stitch purlwise gave a stretchy/loose edge with a very different left and right side. Slipping the first stitch knitwise made the edge firmer. There was still a slight difference between left and right, but that was hardly noticeable.

So, I frogged the front border, knit it again, and was glad I’d taken the trouble.

At this stage Willapa was still a WIP. After the front border I knit the pockets and all the knitting was done. It was then that it became a UFO. I suppose it was because it was almost summer by then, and a warm cardi seemed irrelevant. And also because I dreaded weaving in all those ends and wasn’t happy about the pockets.

Well, my afternoon off solved all that. Weaving in the ends took about an hour, but was quite pleasant with some good music on.

My husband isn’t a big fan, so I only play this music when he’s not there. But I love it, especially On the Nature of Daylight. It is something between classical and minimal music, and the composer’s own website says, ‘The Blue Notebooks is a subtle and peaceful protest against political, social and personal brutality.’

With that peaceful protest in the background, I found the courage to finish my cardigan. Here it is:

It has a very wide front border, widened at the neck with short rows, that can be turned down to a nice collar.

Following the instructions in the pattern, the pockets would have ended up exactly on the sides of my hips. This is already my widest part, and it doesn’t need to be accented by pockets. So I moved the pockets down and forward, where they almost disappeared into the lower border:

Unlike the pattern, I used the same edge stitch for the pockets as for the front border (slipping the first stitch knitwise). The pattern didn’t say how to sew on the pockets. I tried out several ways, and in the end just used ordinary small back stitches. The pockets are on the small side, but big enough for a hankie or a slip of paper with some notes.

Willapa is knit from the top down, has narrow sleeves with wide cuffs meant to be folded double, and has lovely raglan shoulders.

All in all I’m very happy with the pattern, the yarn and the end result. If you’re looking for a simple, but definitely not frumpy looking cardi to knit, I can really recommend Willapa. You can find it on Ravelry and on the Brooklyn Tweed website. It is a well-written pattern and, apart from the edge stitches, there is much to love about it. I hope my notes are helpful for anyone making it.

(I can also recommend taking an afternoon off when you’re not feeling quite well.)

So this was my first UFO turned FO. One down, eight more to go.

March Miscellany 2020

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Hello! How are you faring? We’ve had a lot of wet and windy weather here lately. The wettest February on record, our Meteorological Institute tells us. We could use some water after the past two very dry summers, but did we really need as much as this? I hope your feet, like ours, are still dry.

They also tell us that this was the second mildest winter on record, with the average temperature three degrees higher than normal. I can’t see this as anything other than a sign of rapid climate change and it worries me a lot. What can we, insignificant individuals, do?

Flowers never fail to cheer me up on dark and dismal days. I especially love roses, but roses flown in from Africa? Probably not the best idea. Tulips grown locally seem a more sustainable choice. I’m not terribly fond of tulips, but I’ll try to appreciate them more. I do love other indoor bulbs, though, like the magnificent amaryllis.

Bought from our neighbours’ boy, who sold them for a school project, I planted it in early December. It took a long time to come into flower, but when it did, wow!

Our front garden is still very bare after last year’s reconstruction, but some of the bulbs we planted are now starting to appear. Thank you, brave little dwarf iris, for your elegant flowers and beautiful colours.

I called this blog post March Miscellany because there are all kinds of things I need to show and tell you. I hope you can spare a few minutes more.

First there is the shawl where I was dithering over whether or not to include the grey. The entire crafts group at our local library and almost everybody else I asked said: ‘Leave out the grey.’ I felt the same. The other colours were harmonious together, the grey was the odd one out. And yet, and yet…

Then I looked at the book I was reading and knew what to do. Two tiny rows of grey stitches at the colour changes, a little like the small stones in the mosaic borders along the fresco from Pompeii on the front cover. That’s what I would do.

For those of you who’ve given me advice: thank you! Even though I didn’t do exactly as you said, your input really helped. It supported me in my feeling that an entire block of grey would spoil the shawl and made me look for other options.

This is what I was/am still reading:

Roman Woman, written by an archaeologist, is about a year in the life of Senovara, a young woman with two children, married to a Roman veteran turned shoemaker. It is AD 133 and the family lives in York, then called Eboracum. The chapters follow the months of the year, from Ianuarius to December.

Allason-Jones has cleverly woven loads of humdrum details of everyday life in Roman Britain into an engaging story. We see Senovara caring for her family, ‘ironing’ her laundry (rubbing the creases out of her linen with a glass ball), doing her shopping, visiting with friends and going to the bathhouse. I had no idea that women at that time already plucked their eyebrows and used depilatory cream!

Senovara is from a local tribe, while her husband is a ‘Roman’ from Germania, and I think it’s particularly interesting to read how different cultures and religions coexisted and merged.

Okay, on to the next subject. THIS IS A WARNING!

In a previous post I wrote about knit blockers. You know, those handy tools like small combs that can be used for blocking knitwork instead of T-pins. Well, recently I used them to block the swatches I knit for a new design of my own, in an airy, bulky wool yarn. This is the back of one of them:

Now look at the bottom, and especially at the left-hand corner. Can you see those tiny little bumps? They are hard spikes that shouldn’t be there. Fortunately it’s just a swatch. Had it been a scarf, those bumps wouldn’t have felt nice against the skin at all. The tines of the knit blockers seem to have worked like felting needles, felting the wool in the places where they went in, and damaging the blocking mat in the process:

It is the first time this has happened to me. The other times I used the blockers they were fine, but I thought I’d better warn you. I’ll certainly use them again, but will be extra careful not to push through if I feel any resistance at all.

Okay, next subject again.

Finally, finally the yarn for our daughter’s sweater has come. It crossed the Channel several times, as it went back to sender for unknown reasons. And when it finally reached me, one of the skeins was a different dye bath. Grumble, grumble. Was this my punishment for buying yarn overseas instead of locally?

Oh, well, it won’t show if I use the ‘wrong’ skein for the ribbing. The colour our daughter has chosen is a beautiful deep brick red (darker than in the photo). I’m looking forward to starting!

I wish you a lovely weekend, with some nice knitting on your needles or a good book to read. And I hope to see you here again soon!

Funnel Beaker

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Hello again, and thank you for your ideas, both on and offline, about last week’s grey yarn. More about that project soon, but today’s blog post is about something completely different.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, it won’t come as a surprise that making things is an important part of my life. It’s usually something to do with yarn or wool, but I also enjoy excursions into other mediums now and then. Recently I spent a Saturday morning at a nearby visitor centre (above) making something with clay.

The visitor centre is in the same area where I once had an interesting chat with a shepherd. It is, in fact, next to the sheep fold, so I arrived a little early to say hello to the sheep. Good morning!

The sheep didn’t answer, but quietly kept munching grass and hay before starting their daily walk on the heath.

Walking on, I ran into this big guy (or gal). Whoa!

Fortunately it was just a print on a big banner on the outside wall of the sheep fold.

I’m not just including this photo here for fun, but also because this morning was about going back in time. Not quite as far back in time as this mammoth, but almost. Wikipedia tells me that the mammoth died out around 4,000 years ago. On this Saturday morning, we were going back to the funnel beaker culture, which started here around 3,400 years ago.

The morning began with a short talk about the people who became known for their funnel-neck pots, but also made pottery in other shapes. They were not the first inhabitants of this area, but they were the first farmers, and thousands of shards of their pots have been found around here. They are also the people who built the dolmens and tumuli that are still visible in our landscape today.

Well, I can’t tell you everything I’ve learnt, but I can tell you that it was fascinating.

Then it was time to roll up our sleeves and make a funnel beaker ourselves. The artist who gave the workshop had made two examples. This is one of them:

Unlike the original funnel beaker makers, we didn’t have to travel a long way to find the right kind of river clay for our pots. We were given a slab of a similar clay…

… and started by rolling it out.

Originally the base would have been shaped by hand, and that’s what some of the more experienced participants also did. For those of us with little or no experience (like me) there were moulds to use.

My neighbour at the table was more experienced and had shaped her beaker in no time.

I used too much water to ‘glue’ the next layer onto the base and had to place the beginnings of my pot on a bench outside to dry a little before I could continue, next to those of two other beginners. Mine is on the right.

Several hours later we had all made something that looked more or less like a funnel beaker. Some of the pots were fairly small, like the ones that would originally have been used to store seeds. Others were a lot bigger, like the ones used to hold water or as cooking pots.

The pottery shards of the funnel beaker culture found around here are often richly decorated. In the past, people used feathers, pieces of wood or bone and their fingernails to make the decorations. I used a spatula for the lines and a stick for the dots on my pot.

It was while I was carefully pressing my stick into the soft clay to make dots, that I suddenly felt transported back a few thousand years. In my mind, I was sitting outside, in front of a wattle and daub dwelling, decorating my pot. There was a piercing wind, but dressed in animal skins, I didn’t feel the cold. I could hear sheep bleating and pigs grunting, and I could smell the sweet smell of the cows grazing nearby. I was looking forward to our meal of lentils and foraged greens. Life was hard and uncertain, but it also had its good moments.

Fast forward to the present, I finished my pot by adding a few details in white. Originally a substance made from ground bones and some kind of binder would have been used, but we used a modern paint of which I’ve forgotten the name.

Now my funnel beaker is drying in the artist’s studio, waiting to be fired in her kiln. It should be a soft rosy colour when it comes out. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it’s turned out.

Links:

  • The talk about the funnel beaker culture was held by someone from the Oermuseum, a small but interesting museum with archaeological finds and information about how people lived and worked in the north of the Netherlands from the last ice age to the iron age.
  • The artist who kindly and expertly taught us how to make a funnel beaker was Elisa van den Berg.

In Love with Making

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Why make things when we can buy them?

For my Mum it was necessary to make things because they weren’t available in shops or she couldn’t afford to buy them. For me and for my daughter’s generation it’s different. We don’t need to make things and it is, in fact, often less expensive to buy ready-made things than to buy the materials to make them ourselves. So, why still make things?

As always, I can really only speak for myself, but I think we all agree that a home-cooked meal tastes much better than any ready-made meal from the supermarket. There is nothing we can buy that comes close to a hand-knit pair of socks. And would you ever treasure a shop-bought bed covering as much as you do the quilt or the crocheted blanket your grandmother made?

It may sound cheesy, but for me, it’s all about love. Love of the materials, love of colours, love of the people I make things for, love of the process of making. That’s why Making appeals to me so much. Everything about this bi-annual magazine speaks of the love of making things.

In the US one issue costs $ 26,00 and it is around the same price in Euros in the Netherlands. That’s a steep price for a magazine, but… it was love at first sight. And what’s more, the first two issues were themed Flora and Fauna.

How could I resist?

The people at Making always work with themes. There are always two related themes following each other: Flora and Fauna, Dots and Lines, Color and Black & White, Desert and Forest. I love the whole idea, as well as the projects, the photographs, the stories, the styling and even the ads (there are just a few, they are only on the last few pages, and they are in keeping with the theme).

Knitting is only one of the crafts in Making. There is also weaving, sewing, embroidery, dyeing, felting, rug hooking and much more, as well as a recipe now and then and essays about all kinds of interesting subjects. Some of the projects are small and simple, others a little more complicated.

I brought the third issue, themed Dots, with me on a holiday to Germany a few years back.

I enjoyed leafing through it when I woke up early in the morning. And I enjoyed studying the photographs and reading the essays in the evenings on the covered porch of our Ferienwohnung, after we’d come back from one of our long walks.

Everything in this Dots issue is in shades of indigo blue or undyed. It isn’t as if everything is covered in polka dots – the dots theme is much more subtle than that. In one of the knitting projects, the triangular Indigo Sea Shawl, the dots take the form of a row of eyelets along one side:

During the same holiday in Germany, I bought yarn for this shawl in a very special yarn shop in a former smithy, a few miles from our holiday home. The pattern specified three 50-gram skeins of a sport weight yarn. With a wingspan of just over a metre it was too small to my liking, so I bought four skeins.

I chose three shades of blue-green (what else?), and then added a grey one for a little contrast.

After we got home, I regretted the grey. (It is muddier than in the photo, with a hint of brown.) I didn’t love it and had the feeling that it sucked the colour out of the blue-green shades. I couldn’t go back to change it for a different colour, so I put it away until I knew what to do.

I dug out the yarn for the utterly simple Indigo Sea Shawl recently because I’m desperately in need of another in-between-projects project. Why?

Well, although I love making things, it isn’t always plain sailing. Just as in any important relationship, there are struggles and setbacks from time to time. Right now, I’m puzzling over a new design that isn’t working out as I at first envisioned it. I’m struggling to finish a UFO. And after weeks of waiting, the yarn I’ve ordered for a sweater for our daughter still hasn’t arrived.

So when I saw that Juffrouw Lanterfant (the yarn shop I wrote about last week) stocked the same yarn, I decided to replace the grey with another shade of blue. I photographed the skeins, wound the yarn into balls and took more photographs.

And then, looking at the photographs, I thought: hmmm, perhaps that grey isn’t so bad after all. I still don’t love it, but I don’t hate it anymore either. Maybe it will work in combination with the blues. Maybe it will even be a valuable addition.

So, what shall I do? Embrace a colour I’m not really in love with and give it a chance? Or tell it that I don’t see a future for us together and take it to my knitting group’s yarn swap in March?

Unfortunately the Dots issue is now out of print. The other issues are still available from some yarn shops and on the Making website.

Miss Lazy Daisy

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The route to the meeting I was going to attend in the city of Groningen ran right past a yarn shop. Because it isn’t every day that I visit Groningen, I packed my camera and took an earlier train to have some time to browse around and take pictures.

After a short walk from the railway station, I stood in front of Juffrouw Lanterfant (which translates into something like Miss Lazy Daisy). It is a corner shop with an old, tall and narrow door and other lovely old details. 

As soon as I entered, I was dazzled by the wall of brightly coloured skeins of yarn. I’m not entirely sure, but I think these are from Hedgehog Fibres:

Just the thing for a Stephen West design. I have met Stephen several times and know first-hand that he is a very friendly person as well as an incredibly prolific designer. Although we have very different tastes, I think what he is doing is really, really interesting and highly original.

On a coat rack there were several shop samples of shawls, loops, cardigans and sweaters. The short-sleeved top with the attractive all-over pattern and lovely neckline is ‘Sanctuary’ from Pompom Quarterly #29.

And, oh, that beautiful rainbow of colours in the small cupboard to the right of it! That must be Appletons crewel wool.

And what do I spy on the top shelf?

Several gift boxes filled with ArtYarns’ luxurious fibres embellished with beads or sequins. I once splashed out on one single skein of those, a silvery yarn with beads AND sequins. ArtYarns are a bit too blingy for an entire shawl to my taste, but in combination with other, quieter yarns – yum!

At the other end of the spectrum, the shop also stocks Icelandic Létt Lopi. A rustic, really woolly, sheepy yarn.

The shop lady was knitting a humongous shawl from it, in black, grey and white with fluorescent pink accents. She said it would be about 4 metres long when finished. Here it is, laid out on the reading table:

I love it when a yarn shop has a big table like this, even though (or perhaps especially if) it is rather messy. Nowadays, yarn shops aren’t just about buying yarn. They are also great places to find inspiration, leaf through new knitting books and meet other makers.

Having said that, I did buy something – one beautiful skein of yarn to complement several others I once bought in Germany:

If you’re ever in the area, do pop into Juffrouw Lanterfant. Their address and most (but not all) of the yarns they stock are on their website.

This blog post isn’t sponsored in any way. I sometimes write about yarn shops because I love chatting about the materials I choose and use, and also because I think it may be of interest to other knitters. I feel a bit silly repeating this every time, so I have now altered my ‘About’ page to explain once and for all that I don’t have a hidden agenda.

In-Between-Projects Project

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Pale, medium and dark grey, with a some clear blue thrown in now and then – that’s February skies. For people in the Southern hemisphere, like some of my relatives and friends, it’s a different story, of course. But if you’re in the North and tired of dreary days, I hope this blogpost will work as a spot of colour therapy.

A long time ago, I bought a big bag full of alpaca yarn. Single balls in many different colours and some neutrals to offset all that brightness. I was going to crochet a granny square blanket, something like this:

After crocheting just a few squares I realized that the yarn wasn’t suitable. At least not to my taste. It had zero elasticity, which meant that it lacked the squishiness and coziness factor that a blanket needs. It was also very smooth and slippery, and I was afraid that all those woven in ends would soon unravel.

I put the yarn away until I had a better idea for it.

Many years later, I thought of starting an ‘in-between-projects project’ – something simple to knit while I was finishing another project, to prevent that from becoming a UFO. Something that I could easily put aside when I was ready to start something new, and pick up again when that was at the finishing stage. It needed to be rather boring, or I would still be in danger of creating more UFOs.

I chose this pattern:

It is simply called ‘Stole’ (Ravelry link) and was designed by Theresa Gaffey. Basically it is no more than a huge expanse of ribbing. My alpaca yarn would be ideal for it – nice and drapey. There wouldn’t be too many ends to weave in that could come undone. And I had many colours to choose from.

I thought it would be nice to do one half in neutrals (black and greys) and one half in cheerful colours. This was my original colour choice:

But when I was on to the last colour but one, I wasn’t happy. The medium pink looked ‘dirty’ beside the bright fuchsia, and the whole thing seemed out of balance. So I tried out all kinds of alternative colour combinations, always keeping the neutral half intact.

I tried some very bright colours next to the original red and fuchsia. Cheerful, and a lovely contrast with the neutral half…

… but not really ‘me’.

Some purples next to the red and fuchsia then?

Not bad, but not great either.

Okay, what if I ripped out the red, fuchsia and pink entirely? That would mean many, many hours of knitting down the drain (there were 400+ stitches on my needles), but I didn’t mind. This wasn’t about finishing something quickly.

So, what if I chose a gradient of pinks and purples, mirroring the gradient of neutrals?

Nice. Well- balanced. But I wasn’t in love with it.

How about a gradient of blues instead?

Ahhh, yes, that felt good. But, really, blues again? Very predictable and not very exciting.

In the end I went with the blues anyway. I ripped the stole back almost entirely to the neutrals, but decided to make it a little more exciting by leaving in a very narrow band of red.

Here is Theresa Gaffey’s Stole finished:
(I wasn’t feeling very photogenic and cut my head off. Don’t worry – just in the photo.)

Well, it is no longer Theresa Gaffey’s stole, but very much mine. I used her pattern as a starting point, but cast on more stitches, made the ‘ribs’ several stitches wider, added I-cord edges, chose a very different colour combination, and used 11 colours instead of her 9.

That’s one of the nice things about knitting. You don’t need to be hugely creative to make a project your own. Just choose different colours, tweak a few details if you like, and you end up with something unique.

With its 0.70 by 2.20 m / 27’’ by 87’’ it is a huge stole – almost a blanket.

I didn’t use blocking wires to stretch the knitting out. I just soaked the stole in a no-rinse detergent for 30 minutes and put it in the spin-dryer. Then I stretched it out on the floor, using my hands to smooth and stretch the knitting as much as possible. As an alternative it could be stretched out on a bed, or perhaps even folded double and stretched out over a drying rack. Warning: Some colours may bleed!

Now I still have more of the alpaca left.

Would I like to make another stole like this? Hmmm, maybe later. I loved the meditative nature of this project. And my idea behind it seemed to work – I haven’t created any new UFOs for quite a while. (I haven’t finished any old ones either, but I’m working on that.) But I think I’ll first choose something else as my next in-between-projects project.

A New Visitor to our Garden

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It was on a Saturday morning while I was vacuuming the living room that I saw him, the main character of this story – a sparrowhawk. He (we think it’s a young male) was sitting on the fence close to the house. I’d seen him several times before recently, but always in a flash.

This morning, he gave me all the time in the world to get my camera and take pictures. Many pictures. Before I show you some of them, here’s the ‘scene of the crime’:

Looking through our living room window you can see an evergreen shrub, behind the hyacinths. It plays an important part in this story. To the left of it there’s a rain meter, to the left of that a tepee filled with sunflower seeds, and further to the left (not on the photo) there’s a bird table.

That’s where it all happened.

And here are some of the other characters in the story – a large and noisy family of house sparrows:

The sparrows love the sunflower seeds in the tepee, the seeds and grains we put out on the bird table and the peanuts in another feeder. They have lived in our garden for years, but it is only now that the sparrowhawk seems to have discovered them.

A sparrowhawk isn’t called sparrowhawk for nothing. It doesn’t care for sunflower seeds or grains. And peanuts? Blech! Their favourite food is… sparrow!

As soon as the sparrowhawk flies over the garden, the sparrows and other garden birds are gone. They hide in the beech hedge or in the evergreen shrub in front of the living room window. The garden seems deserted.

For the sparrowhawk, it takes a while to sink in. Where are they? Normally there are lots of sparrows on this bird feeder:

He looks down. No, no sparrow in sight.

Then he seems to hear something in the evergreen shrub. Aha, there they are. He looks at it from the rain meter. No, he can’t get at them from there.

Then he tries a different approach. Sitting on the grass he looks up. Hmmmm…

He walks around the shrub and looks and looks. But there’s no way he can get at the sparrows.

Finally he perches on top of the shrub, waiting patiently for the sparrows to come out of their hiding place.

Beautiful bird, isn’t he?

The sparrows wisely stay where they are. But suddenly, whoosh, the sparrow hawk grabs another hapless little bird from the honeysuckle against the fence. It went so fast that I could hardly see it, let alone photograph it.

Wow, what an amazing bird.

Apart from the birds, there isn’t much to see in the garden at this time of the year. The only other thing that catches the eye is the witch hazel we planted last autumn.

I’m very grateful for its cheerful yellow flowers.

Everything else is brown and grey, with a little bit of green here and there. If I want more colour, I have to look for it elsewhere. Fortunately there’s always yarn! (More about what I did with it soon.) 

I can only show you static photos of the sparrowhawk here, but there’s an amazing 3-minute BBC video of a sparrowhawk if you’d like to see it in flight.

UFOs and a WIP turned FO

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Knitters love abbreviations. An experienced knitter will be able to instantly visualize an instruction like ‘K2, yo, *(k2tog) 3 times, (yo, k1) 6 times, (k2tog) 3 times; work from * to last 3 sts, yo, k2tog, k1’.

Now, please don’t run away screaming if you’re not all that into abbreviations. For this post it’s enough to know just these three:

  • FO = Finished Object – This speaks for itself. Any piece of knitting that is completed (including weaving in the ends and sewing on buttons) is an FO.
  • WIP = Work In Progress – This refers to a piece of knitting that is actively worked on, or at least is still in the forefront of the knitter’s mind.
  • UFO = UnFinished Object – A UFO is an incomplete piece of knitting that has been abandoned, hidden away in a dark cupboard or even completely forgotten.

Note: the line between a WIP and a UFO may be thin.

As I told you last week, I have more than a few UFOs. Some of them have lived in a dark cupboard for quite a while. Here they are:

There are 9 items in total: 4 cardigans, 2 scarves, 2 cowls and 1 crochet project.

Embarrassing? Yes, slightly. But there are worse skeletons to have in one’s cupboard, aren’t there? And I can’t be the only one, surely?

My resolution is to finish them all in 2020, or rip out the ones that I don’t want to finish anymore and repurpose the yarn. I’ll write about them here, now and then, hoping that they’ll provide some inspiration, or an interesting or funny story. The only rule I’m imposing on myself is that they should all be gone (finished or repurposed) by the end of the year.

I plan to take the UFOs out of their hiding place one at a time, and transfer them, one by one, to the basket I made last year. I’ll place the basket in plain sight, so that I won’t forget it.

But first I needed to free up the basket. So to start with, I’ve finished my blue knitting project. This wasn’t a UFO but definitely a WIP.

It is a long-sleeved cardigan with knit-in pockets. I chose this pattern by Kim Hargreaves because I wanted something simple for everyday wear.

Sometimes I block garment pieces, but this time I followed the designer’s instructions and pressed them. I placed the pieces on the ironing board, covered them with a damp tea towel and, with the iron on ‘wool’, carefully pressed them.

It’s a miracle what this does to the knitting:

Inside of pocket before pressing...
...and after pressing

It’s very satisfying to see all the neatly pressed pieces hanging over the back of a chair:

For me, it is at the finishing stage that a WIP is most in danger of becoming a UFO. No matter how much positive self-talk I use, I don’t enjoy the finishing part of knitting. But some music and a mug of tea help a little.

Invisibly sewing the pocket linings to the inside of the fronts took several attempts. After seaming the rest together and sewing on the buttons, the entire cardigan was done. A WIP turned FO.

Am I happy with it? On the whole, yes, but there are two things I’m not entirely happy with. The first is that the cardi twists slightly to the right, as you can see in the photo below.

It’s not that I put it on hastily. I already noticed that the pieces were slightly askew while I was still working on them. It must be something in the yarn that makes the fabric behave this way.

The yarn (Rowan ‘Alpaca Classic’) is made with a new technique. The alpaca fibres are blown into a cotton tube, resulting in a soft and airy yarn. I’m not an expert, but perhaps the cotton tube needs a tiny bit of tweaking?

The second thing I’m not happy with is that the button bands gape. Look:

The button bands don’t overlap as they should. This isn’t because the cardi is too tight – it has enough ease as you can see from the back.

It’s always hard to get narrow button bands right. Maybe they gape because the yarn is so very, very soft and airy. Oh well, I’ll usually wear it open anyway.

The things I do like are the simple, round neckline…

… the rolled sleeve hems and pocket tops…

… and the side vents with their neat garter stitch borders that are exactly the same width as the border along the bottom of the cardi.

I love this kind of attention to detail. But what I love most of all about this cardi is that it is incredibly soft and lightweight. It weighs just 250 grams! Very simple and very wearable.

Kim Hargreaves is an independent British designer. Her patterns have given me many hours of knitting pleasure over the years. The pattern of the cardigan above is called ‘Fair’ (Ravelry link) and comes from Kim’s book Pale.