on the needles

Flower Colours

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Hello! Here’s an update on my Seventh Heaven Scarf from left-over bits of sock yarn. The first two-thirds are finished – the green-and-blue part.

The part of the scarf with the greens of grass, leaves and reed, and the blues of sky and water.

Now it’s time for the flower colours. Time for thistle purple.

Time for ragged robin pink.

Time for calendula orange.

And time for flag iris yellow.

I’m adding just a small touch of yellow, in a yarn with oranges and pinks, but it’ll be a cheerful touch at the end of the scarf.

I took all of the flower and landscape pictures during a walk in the Wieden part of the Weerribben-Wieden National Park. All but one – the orange one. The orange tip butterfly didn’t show itself, and I had to look to our herb patch for a splash of orange.

June is a lovely time to be in the Wieden, with not just many beautiful and rare flowers and birds, but also lots of damselflies flitting and dragonflies whirring about and sunning themselves.

It’s been far too hot to have a warm scarf like this on my lap over the past week, and the heat doesn’t look like letting up soon. I think I’ll put my Seventh Heaven Scarf on hold for a bit, although I know that’s risky – no deadline, out of sight is out of mind etcetera. I do want to finish it, though, so will keep it in sight.

Keep cool, calm and hydrated!

Links:
The preliminary pattern of the Seventh Heaven Scarf can be found in this post.
For some more armchair travelling to the Weerribben-Wieden National Park visit this website.

6 Knitting Baskets

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Hello!

A Ravelry friend of mine is trying out being a monogamous knitter, i.e. working on just one knitting project at a time until it is completely finished. She used to be a multi-project knitter like me, and is now finishing one beautiful project after the next. That made me stop in my tracks: could I be a monogamous knitter, too? It sounds attractively simple.

But what if, for instance, I’m in the seaming stage of a sweater and need something small to take along to knit on a trip? Or what if I’m knitting something intricate, am tired in the evening and would benefit from some restful mindless knitting?

At the moment I have 6 projects on the go, and they all live in separate baskets. There is nothing spectacular inside any of these baskets, but perhaps you’d like to take a look?

Basket 1:

This is the project I want to finish first – a jacket for our grandson. He has almost outgrown the jacket I knit for him before and will need a new one soon. The sleeves are almost finished and then all it needs is a hood.

Basket 2:

This vest is even closer to being finished. All I need to do is knit ribbings for the pockets, sew the pocket linings in place and sew on buttons.

Basket 3:

This is my sock knitting basket. It holds all kinds of knitting paraphernalia, a pair of striped socks that only need their ends woven in, and a ball of beautiful pink sock yarn. Both of these lovely yarns (one with yak down and one with silk!) were a gift from a friend. I’d like to make a very special pair from the solid pink yarn, perhaps something with cables or twisted stitches, or a bit of lace…

Basket 4:

This may look like knitted bunting, but is in fact part of a series of swatches for a new design of my own. These three mini-swatches are all about increases. M1L, M1R, kfb or kfbf? I’m puzzling out which increases to use where.

Basket 5:

This is a simple cardigan for myself, knit from a very soft wool and alpaca blend. It is hard to capture the colour – it’s a deep navy blue IRL. I’m keeping track of where to knit in the button holes by looking deep into the eyes of this panda:

It’s a fun but unreliable row counter. The problem is that its lock doesn’t function, which means I need to be very careful with it or it’ll jump from 19 to 29 or 39 rows and then where would I be?

Basket 6:

Sorry, I can’t show you what’s inside the last basket. It’s a surprise gift in the making. Well, okay, I can tell you that it’s going to be a pair of mittens. I’ll be able to show you after they’ve been unwrapped, towards the end of December or early in the New Year.

More about my progress with the contents of the other baskets soon, I hope, including details about the patterns, the yarns etc. Six baskets is about the maximum I can handle, I think. And I’d really like to reduce the number to three or four. Or shall I try reducing them to just one? How about you? How many projects do you feel comfortable juggling? And how do you organize them?

Domino Knitting

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Hello!

After all the gadding about of the past few weeks, I think it’s time for some serious knitting again. I hope you’re up for it.

I first heard of domino knitting from a Danish woman I once met on a campsite in Rondane, Norway. She was sitting in front of her tent knitting back and forth on very short wooden needles. I was intrigued and asked her what she was making.

As is often the way with knitters, she was only too happy to talk about it. She told me that she was making a scarf for her sister-in-law from a pattern in the booklet Domino Strikk, by Danish designer Vivian Høxbro.

As soon as the booklet came out in English, in 2002, I bought it.

Høxbro didn’t invent the technique. In her foreword she tells us that it had been around for at least a century before she discovered it, only it wasn’t called domino knitting then. She was the one who made it popular, though.

The booklet clearly explains how domino knitting works with small modules, ‘knitted together while the work progresses, just as one “pieces” the tiles in dominoes’, and encourages us to try the techniques out by knitting potholders first.

I made a couple of potholders to give domino knitting a try. They turned out too big and floppy to be useful. I have never used them, but kept them as a kind of curiosity. Here they are:

I left it at that, went on to knit other things, and more or less forgot about domino knitting. Until I started knitting a cardigan called Panel Debate last month.

As the name suggests, it is made up of panels. After finishing the first three panels, I suddenly thought, Why does this feel so familiar? Wait, this is potholder number five!

Well, it’s more like a super extended version of potholder #5, but it follows the same principle.

Narrow panels (1-3 below) are knit back and forth in alternating knit and purl ridges. Then stitches are picked up along the long sides for the next panel (4), knit lengthwise. The panel next to that is a narrow strip again, attached by knitting it together with the stitches of the previous panel every other row, and so on and so forth.

Calling Panel Debate an extended potholder doesn’t do it justice at all, of course. What with the knitted-on sleeves and I-cord finishing it is much more than that. The designer has also added lovely short-row fans at the bottom of fronts and back.

It’s a lot of stitches on 2.75 mm needles, and after I’d knit the swatches I wondered if this cardigan really was a good idea and if I’d ever finish it. But because of the modular technique, Panel Debate stays interesting and makes me want to keep on knitting.

There are heaps more domino-knit type of garment patterns around. Many of them use variations on the mitred squares of my potholders.

It’s a technique particularly suitable for colour-shift yarns like Noro. I really love the way this sweater makes use of the colours.

As Høxbro warns us in her foreword, ‘Domino knitting is addictive.’ Why did it take me so long to get hooked?

Rose-Tinted

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Hello!

It’s good to be back! After a week of taking things a little more easy, here is the promised knitting update. I hope you don’t mind that it’s grown rather long. All three projects that are on my needles right now are pink, as you can see above. But first, let’s stop and smell the roses.

There’s a lane just outside our village that officially goes by another name, but is locally known as the Black Road. That may sound rather ominous, but it’s just that the soil in that particular area is black, and the road was literally black before it was covered with grit and rubble.

The Black Road isn’t the fastest route to anywhere, and is just used by agricultural traffic and people like us, going for a stroll. At this time of year, the sweet briar growing along it is in flower.

Fully open, the flowers are a very pale pink, almost white. But when they are just opening, they are a more, well, rosy pink.

This is the shade of pink of the first knitting project on my needles. The pattern is called Lace Sampler Scarf, but it is actually more the size of a stole than a scarf.

The ‘sampler’ bit refers to the fact that it uses three different lace patterns and can be a practice piece for beginning lace knitters. These are the first two, called Van Dyke Lace and Diagonal Lace:

I’m using an alpaca yarn that had been waiting for a suitable project to come along for a long time. It is thicker than the yarn used by the designers and I needed to modify the pattern to suit my yarn and the amount of it I had. I’ll write more about how everything works out when it’s finished. What I can say already, is that it’s a very enjoyable knit.

The second project on my needles is actually a UFO – one of the 9 UnFinished Objects languishing in a dark corner that I want to finish (or frog) this year. It is in the shades of pink of some of the lupins in our front garden.

It is ‘Kinetic’, a long, striped cardigan from Rowan Magazine 65.

I started it in early summer last year and am not quite sure why I abandoned it. It certainly isn’t the yarn. The pink yarn is a gorgeous blend of cotton and cashmere. It is combined with some white Kidsilk Haze – a fine lacy blend of mohair and silk – left over from another project.

I think it’s the stripes that I’m not really happy about. Perhaps the white is too white next to the pinks? The cotton-cashmere yarn is also much thicker than the Kidsilk Haze, and the narrow white stripes knit on the same needle size are slightly transparent as a result. What will that look like when worn? Will the garment underneath shine through? Will it stand up to frequent washing? And won’t it sag?

What to do? Finish it? Or frog it and make something else with the yarn? What do you think?

Looking at this post and my blog in general, it may seem as if I view the world through rose-tinted glasses. Well, I do and I don’t. I’m not a happy-go-lucky person by nature. World politics, racism, poverty and climate change can keep me awake at night. And now there’s also this pandemic with its short and long-term impact. Sometimes, I’m hopeful that the current crisis will lead to a better, fairer and cleaner world, but on the whole I’m not so optimistic.

I think it’s important not to look away, and to do what is within my (limited) power. I also think it’s important not to go down a figurative Black Road. That’s why I deliberately put on those special glasses now and then – the ones that focus on things that are good for the soul. Like roses. And knitting.

So, here’s a tiny corner of the third rose-tinted project I’m working on. It’s something I’m designing myself. I hope to publish the (free) pattern soon, if not next week, then the week after that.

It’s inspired by this challenging time we’re going through. I know that may not sound very attractive, and I can’t guarantee that you’ll like it, of course, but I really hope that it will make you smile.

It’s a small project for intermediate knitters with some experience in lace knitting. If that sounds like you and you feel like starting something new in the near future, why not start rummaging through your stash now?

What you should look for in those boxes in your attic, in the cupboard under the stairs or under the sofa, is 100 grams of fingering-weight yarn (approx. 360 m/395 yds). A solid or semi-solid colourway will work best. It can be a luxury yarn or a sock yarn, as long as it is soft enough to be worn around the neck. Choose the colour you feel most at home with!

Well, that’s all for now. Thank you for reading and I hope to ‘see’ you here again soon!

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!

Ordinary Autumn Days

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Most of my days are ordinary days. And November is, perhaps, the most ordinary month of the year. Nothing special seems to be happening.

I’m fine with that. It makes me appreciate the little things in life more. Like the meadow saffron on our window sill.

The bulb was a birthday gift from my BFF, and it has given me flowers for over two months. It’s finished flowering now, and we’ve planted it in the garden, along with many other bulbs – snowdrops, miniature daffodils, crocuses, winter aconites and purple and yellow dwarf irises.

The garden work is done. All we can do now, is wait for spring.

My days are filled with ordinary things, like computer work, housework and reading. This is the book I’m reading now – Circe (translated into Dutch under the same title).

Greek mythology told from the viewpoint of a woman (well, Circe is actually a minor goddess, but still a female). It’s a great read. As far as I know, the ancient Greeks and their gods didn’t knit, but there is some weaving in it. Spell weaving, but also actual weaving on a loom, made by Daedalus.

There’s some knitting woven through my days, too, of course. At lunch time, I knit a few rows on an ordinary sock.

It’s a simple pleasure, easy to pick up for a few minutes and put down again until later.

As I work from home, it’s tempting to stay indoors all day on dark, rainy days.

But I make a point of going out every single day, to get as much fresh air, exercise and daylight as I can, no matter what the weather. Sometimes, when I think of it, I take some pictures of ordinary things along the way.

Now and then, in between the gloomy and overcast days, we’re treated to a day of glorious sunshine. It’s an extra treat when this happens on a Sunday, when we’re able to take a longer walk…

… and enjoy the sun illuminating yellowed moor grass along the water’s edge…

… tufts of moor grass growing in the water…

… and the still surface of a small lake mirroring some birches.

It gets dark early and the evenings are long. Every evening I add a few centimetres to the simple cardigan I’m knitting.

And I finally find the time to weave in the ends of some dishcloths that I knit a while ago.

Ordinary things. Simple pleasures. Nothing special.

Having said all that, I do have something special to celebrate next week. I hope you’ll join me again then.

Herb Teas and Honey Bees

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Hello again! I hope you have some time in your busy day for a leisurely scroll through our garden, a visit to a beekeeper, and a cup of tea and some knitting afterwards. Or perhaps you’re on holiday and have all the time in the world. Wherever you are or whatever your day looks like – welcome!

Today, I’d like to show you a new part of our garden. A part you haven’t seen yet – our herb patch. It isn’t very big (about two by two-and-a-half meters) but I’m very happy with it. Here it is just after we planted it mid-May:

And this is what it looks like now, two months later:

Isn’t it amazing how quickly things grow? There’s parsley, chives, thyme and sage for all kinds of savoury dishes. There’s rhubarb for stewing, nasturtium flowers for decorating salads, and ‘wild’ strawberries for enjoying straight from the plant. I don’t know what to do with the marigolds yet. I could use them to dye some yarn, but what would I do with yellow yarn? For the time being I’m just enjoying them for their cheerful colour.

And finally, there’s chamomile, peppermint and lemon balm. We’ll be making herb tea with those later. But first, let’s get some honey to sweeten it. If we hop on to our bicycles we’ll be at the beekeeper’s farm in under an hour. It’s a nice route along a canal, past some allotments, through a wood, and along a country lane.

Here we are. There are jars of honey and an honesty box at the roadside. We could just grab a jar and head back…

… but it’s much nicer to have a chat with the bee keeper and take a look at the bees. We need to put on a special beekeeper’s jacket with hood first. The bees are very quiet today, but it’s better to be on the safe side.

Do you see the line of trees the beekeeper is pointing at? Behind them there’s a nature reserve, with heather and all kinds of other flowering plants, shrubs and trees where the bees get the nectar for their honey.

The beekeeper deprecatingly says, ‘Ah, it’s just a hobby. My dad used to do it before me, and I’ve followed in his footsteps.’ But to her own astonishment and delight both her bright and her dark honey won gold medals at the London Honey Awards 2019!

Most of the bees are housed in modern beehives:

These are far bigger than traditional hives, or skeps, and it is much easier to collect the honey from them. But she also has some traditional skeps, a sort of upside-down baskets. And even a wooden beehive in the shape of a house. It looks a lot like their own beautiful wooden house:

Zooming in on one of the skeps, the bees can be seen coming in and out of the opening:

It’s that dark clump at the top left. Can you see them?

This beekeeper isn’t complaining, but behind her words I can hear her worries about the threats her bees (and bees everywhere) face. They’re threatened by the varroa mite, pesticides and the drought caused by climate change. Things like this often give me a feeling of powerlessness. Yes, it’s worrying, but what can we do about such worldwide threats as insignificant individuals? Fortunately, in this case, there are a few easy things we can do to help the bees.

Apart from organic honey in jars, this small family business also produces other bee products, like beeswax candles, lip balm, soap, shampoo and so on. There’s more information on their website.

Well, high time to cycle back and pick some herbs.

One of my favourite herb tea blends is chamomile and lemon balm. A small handful of chamomile flowers and lemon balm leaves is enough for a cup or two of tea (dried herbs work just as well as fresh ones). I have a small teapot with a built-in strainer, but any pot or mug will do.

Add honey to taste and enjoy!

Next to this cup of tea is my first dishcloth in progress. I was skeptical about knitting these (I mean, how twee can you get?), but the enthusiasm of two of my knitting group members made me give them a try. And I must say, I’ve been bitten by the dishcloth-knitting-bug too!

Another favourite is mint tea. There are many varieties of mint. Wat we usually get when we order mint tea at a cafe is Moroccan mint, with a fairly mild and sweet taste. The mint in our garden, peppermint, has a stronger taste. It really is more peppery. Two or three small sprigs straight into a mug make a refreshing drink. I like it even during the very hot weather we’re currently having – I just leave it to cool first.

The blindingly white knitting on the needles here is the start of my Sideways Tee. There isn’t much to see yet, but as soon as I’m a little further along, I’ll show you more.

Well, that’s all for today. Thank you for sharing a cup of tea with me!

An Afternoon in the Garden

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After several rather busy days, I spent an entire Sunday afternoon in the garden. Just sitting, knitting, drinking tea and looking around with my camera at hand. Everything is growing so fast, I can hardly keep up.

Above, you can see my utterly comfortable chair. It was a present for my 50th Birthday, which seems like yesterday, but is in fact so long ago that the fabric has become quite faded in places.

Behind my chair, you can see a part of our small wildflower meadow. It took a while to get going, but now it’s absolutely glorious, with many different plant species and always something new to discover. And one of the best things about it, is that it attracts lots of butterflies, bees and other insects. Here, on an oxeye daisy, is a large tortoiseshell:

We were thrilled to see it, for it is a rare butterfly that was almost extinct in our country until a couple of years ago. Now it seems to be making a come-back. I’m really glad to be the bringer of this good news amidst all the bad news we hear and read about the terrible decline in biodiversity.

Just like the oxeye daisies, the foxgloves are flowering prodigiously this year.

We didn’t plant or sow these foxgloves. They just arrived out of the blue. The first couple of years there were just a few plants, but look at them now!

Bumble bees are buzzing in and out of their bell-like flowers. I really love their shades from purple to pale pink to white. And they have beautiful burgundy spots inside:

There are more plants in our garden that sprang up of their own accord, and we heartily welcome them (at least some of them). But we also have some that we’ve deliberately planted, like these sweet peas.

They’re growing incredibly fast. Since I took this picture they’ve grown quite a bit, and I can already see some tiny flower buds. I’m so looking forward to the fluttery flowers with their lovely scent.

Apart from plants, butterflies and insects, there is also a lot of bird activity in the garden.

There are many, many young sparrows around, flapping their wings begging for food. Two of our nest boxes are filled with cheeping great tits. And the house martins are flying to and fro to feed their young. After the eggs hatched, the birds threw the empty shells out of the nests. I found them on the ground underneath the nests over several mornings:

The speckled shells are papery thin. So fragile that I could hardly pick them up without crushing them. And so small that it’s hard to imagine a complete chick can come out of them. I’ve photographed the egg shells next to one of our own small, white hen’s eggs to give you some idea of their size:

I found the egg shells a little over two weeks ago. I read that it takes house martins five weeks to fledge, so the adults still have an exhausting few weeks ahead of them.

A good friend of mine, the blackbird, is always around too:

For weeks on end, it was hurrying around, collecting worms and other edibles for its young. I think it has had two consecutive nests. Sadly, it seems that this year just one chick survived. But that chick looks strong and healthy, and can now almost fend for itself:

Two large, noisy families of magpies, by contrast, have done very well. Maybe they’ve raised their young on blackbird eggs or chicks, who knows?. They’re notorious nest raiders. They’ve even been known to steal some of our hen’s eggs, which we briefly left unattended between collecting them from the laying nest and putting them away indoors.

I can almost hear the magpie thinking: ‘Well, how was I to know that you didn’t put them out there especially for us? You leave peanuts, seeds and mealworms out for other birds, too, don’t you?’

In between watching the birds and looking at the flowers around me, I also did some knitting. I started two new projects – both in soft shades of pink. One is a striped cardigan in a combination of yarns in different weights:

And the other is a simple shawl in two different lace-weight yarns held together:

They’re both lovely, relaxing knits. I’ll show you more when I’m a little further along.

The day I sat knitting and taking pictures in the garden, was before the onset of some Very Hot weather. For the past few days, it’s been absolutely sweltering. I’ve had to put these knitting projects on hold. The soft, hairy yarn is sticking to my hands, and both the cardi and the shawl in progress are way too hot to have on my lap.

I’m now spending my spare time reading instead, but I need to find something else to do with my hands soon. Something suitable for tropical temperatures.

I’m not much of a summer knitter, really. I often switch over to crochet when temperatures rise. But I’d like to have something summery on my knitting needles, too. Hmmm, I’ll see what I can find. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Frogging

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I’ve been knitting for over fifty years and I knit almost every single day, so I think I can safely say that I’m an experienced knitter. I can’t say that everything always goes swimmingly, though. After all those years, I still run into obstacles, and I still often have to frog things.

For a long time, I was baffled by the verb ‘to frog’ for unravelling knitting. It wasn’t in any of my dictionaries in this sense of the word. I just didn’t get why people called it frogging. Until Adrienne Martini explained it to me, on page 50 of her hilarious book Sweater Quest: My year of knitting dangerously:

‘Frogging, which doesn’t involve amphibians, means pulling out large swaths of knitting at one go. You rip it. If you don’t get the association, say it out loud.’

Rip it, rip it. Ah, I finally got it! Well, I’m a frequent frogger. Take a seemingly simple shawl like Stay Soft.

I started out cheerfully, casting on a small number of stitches, gradually increasing along one edge of the garter stitch rows. Everything was plain and clear in the pattern. No need to frog anything this time, right? Wrong.

Because I had a finer yarn and less yardage than the amount specified in the pattern, I’d decided to use a smaller needle size to be on the safe side. But when I’d finished both the yellow and the striped section (i.e. after knitting about one third of the entire shawl)…

… I had an awful lot of the first yarn colour left over – almost two-thirds of the total amount. It would be a shame to waste all that yarn. Besides, the fabric didn’t feel quite right, and it looked as if the final shawl would end up rather small if I went on like this.

So, I frogged everything I’d knit so far and started afresh with the needle size specified in the pattern.

The second time around the fabric looked and felt better. I quickly re-knit the yellow and the striped sections. On the orange section I ran out of yarn after I’d knit 16 rows less than the pattern indicated, but I wasn’t really worried by that.

By that time the shawl already had quite a good size (but rather a strange shape):

Now it was time to pick up stitches for the third colour. I read through the instructions: ‘pick up and knit 5 stitches starting from the cast-on corner of the shawl.’ Hmmm, where exactly? And how?

This pattern has been knit by many people before, so I thought I’d take a look at other projects on Ravelry, to see how they had done it. I read that others had scratched their heads, too, at this point. Many of them somehow found the solution, and some people even made notes of what they’d done, but I was still a bit confused.

So I tried something, frogged it, tried again, frogged again, until I was happy with the result:

And then I thought: why don’t I write a blog post showing exactly what I’m doing, so that others won’t have to frog as much as did? So that’s what I’m working on now: knitting the rest of the shawl while taking photographs and making notes. If it works out, I’ll show you the results soon.

Note: The frog in the photo at the top of this post is a moor frog that hopped across our path during one of our recent walks. During the mating season the males turn blue for a few days. The frog may look quite big in the photograph, but it was only 5 centimeters (2 inches) long at most.

May Miscellany

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In May…

…all birds their eggs do lay, or so an old Dutch saying goes. But that’s not the only nice thing about the month of May. It’s also the month the vendors at our nearest Farmer’s Market put up their stalls again after their winter break. Visiting this market is a real treat.

The singer who is always there with her guitar, welcomes us with Dolly Parton’s ‘Play a song for me, Apple Jack, Apple Jack’, and other old favourites. The music creates a great atmosphere around the twenty or so stalls.

We always buy a punnet of strawberries. These are so much tastier than the ones from the supermarket. And sometimes we buy some delicious handmade goat’s cheese, too.

New to the market this year is a lady with felt objects, like hats and scarves, as well as handspun yarns. I wouldn’t immediately know what to do with her riotously colourful skeins, as I usually choose quieter yarns (maybe combine them with a matching solid colour?), but they’re a joy to look at.

I love chatting with other crafters about the things they make, about what moves and inspires them, the techniques they use, and so on. So I asked the new lady about the ‘fleece’ hanging at the back of her stall. I’ve seen fleeces like this before, felted onto a woollen background, but always made from the wool of just one sheep.

This crafter, however, combined wool from different sheep breeds to create the fleece in the photo below. She mentioned at least six breeds. (But I don’t remember a single one. Sorry, my brain was also having some time off.) It shows beautifully how greatly sheep’s wool can vary.

Apart from the colours, ranging from white through grey and russet to almost black, the structure of the wool varies too. There are some long straight locks, some fluffy, wavy bits of wool, and some very tight curls.

Birds

Now on to those birds laying their eggs in May. Our nest boxes are often used by blue and great tits (picture below), but I’m not sure who is using which nest box this year. We don’t want to disturb the birds, so we don’t open the boxes to look what’s inside. I’ll just have to spend more time in the garden watching flight movements.

In our beech hedge there’s a blackbird’s nest – or perhaps even two. And just above our bedroom window there are two house martin’s nests. These were first occupied by squatters – two families of cheeky sparrows, whose chicks have already fledged. I’ve seen the parents feeding small pieces of peanut from our feeder to their young.

After the sparrow chicks fledged, the house martins returned from the south. They set about cleaning out and repairing their nests straightaway. I can’t look inside to see whether there are any eggs in them, but I’m pretty sure both nests are back in use.

And the winner is…

I started the month of May with a blog post about a gift of yarn from a friend. In it, I asked for your help in choosing between two patterns I had in mind, called ‘Stripe Study’ and ‘Stay Soft’. I have now counted the votes, and Stay Soft came out on top. It got an overwhelming majority of the votes: 70% for Stay Soft against 30% for Stripe Study.

Now you may think, ‘Huh, but there was only one person who left a comment, voting for Stay Soft! How did you arrive at these percentages?’ Well, many people seem to be hesitant about leaving a comment on a blog. I quite understand. I often read blogs without commenting, too. That’s absolutely fine. What I got instead were phone calls, emails and face-to-face reactions.

So, Stay Soft it is going to be. I’ve already made a start.

A funny thing that struck me, was that most knitters voted for Stay Soft, while most non-knitters voted for Stripe Study. Why would that be? We talked about this in the knitting group I belong to, and one of the members said: ‘It looks like non-knitters focus more on the end product, and knitters more on the knitting process.’ Isn’t that an interesting thought?

Thank you to all of you who helped me decide.