Luxury yarn for a luxury hat for my luxury hair

We've all been there. Bought that really expensive top or shoes (or yarn) and just left it in our closet, not wearing it out of fear that we will ruin it, that no occasion is worthy of it. 

This is what happened when I finally succumbed to the softness and shine of the Fyberspates Scrumptious yarn at the Ally Pally Knitting and Stitching show last year. Should this be a cowl, I wondered, or perhaps fingerless gloves? But is it wasted if I make gloves, which tend to felt and pile as you wear them? And so it sat in my drawer, unused and unloved for a full year.

But my year of making my own clothes has taught me to show them my love by wearing them rather than admiring them in my closet, and I decided that the time had finally come to make something out of this lovely yarn. And here it is.

The yarn is obscenely expensive (I think I paid £15 for one skein of 100g), but it is AMAZING! Definitely the most beautiful yarn I have ever worked with. Ok so it isn't very highly twisted, which made it hard to do all those k2tog and ssk that lace needs, but it is truly a joy to wear. The silk means that it is super super soft and not scratchy at all (something that I struggle with with 100% wool yarns unless they are merino), and also it has a beautiful shine that makes it look that extra bit special. And surely the silk will help stop my stupid hair from going frizzy?!

It helps, of course, that this was a really nice pattern to knit. The pattern is called Schwimmen, and I found it while looking on Ravelry for inspiration based on what other knitters had used this yarn for (which also convinced me that it was ok to use such a luxury yarn for a hat). It has that really good combination of being interesting to knit because of the lace, but at the same time not so complicated that you have to take copious notes and can't do anything else at the same time for fear of distraction. 

Close-up of the lace pattern

I did change it a little bit though. It calls for casting on 110 stitches, but that seemed like far too many so I decided to cast on 100 and then increase after the ribbing panel was done. I couldn't be bothered to calculate how to change the rib based on my number of stitches, so I just did a k1p1 rib instead. And I don't have 3.75mm needles (for the ribbing), so I used one 3.5mm and one 4mm - unorthodox, I know, but I figured it would probably average out somehow! 

The end result is also meant to be quite slouchy, but I was worried it might end up a bit too slouchy, if such a thing exists, so I started the decreases after round 25 of the second round of lace pattern. 

All in all, a huge success for my first fall accessory. Maybe one day I will I deserve something incredible extravagant and buy myself enough of this to make a cardigan or jumper. Maybe.

Of trees and owls: Henriette and Akita

I've been incredible lazy and slow at posting, apologies to anyone who actually follows the blog. I have been crafty, just not really had time to write about it, promise! Here's a bonus picture of Dr Jenner mid-lick, with a hint of the project below (if you are not interested in knitting, you can probably stop here).



Let's start with the Henriette cardi by Andi Satterlund. Remember I said I wanted to get some cotton yarn that behaves more like wool and was thinking of trying Blue Sky Alpacas? Well, I did, and I tell you, this yarn is awesome! Its soft and squishy like wool but also non-itchy and light like cotton. I managed to find some on sale from Mrs Moon so it wasn't horrendous, and it turned out that I bought a whole skein more than I needed (I think I bought four skeins but I only used three) so this wasn't as expensive as I thought it was going to be.

So, back to the cardi. Simply said, this was complicated. Andi does call it a challenging knit, to be fair to her, but I feel that perhaps it is written in a more complicated way than strictly necessary. I essentially had to take notes on what  I was supposed to do for every single row and have at least two if not three sheets of instructions in front of me at all times. I tried to knit some of it during a long drive to Cornwall to use the time for something useful, but the complex instructions along with me getting car sick (apparently knitting on the bus and the car have a different effect) meant that it was impossible.

I didn't deliberately make any modifications, but I completely misunderstood the instructions for the lace/cable trees in the bottom back of the cardi so I think I basically ended up with one giant tree in the middle and two bushes on each side. Oh well!

For anyone interested, the back has three consecutive sections of the lace/cable pattern and the instruction is to start the first and third at row 11 and the middle one at row 1. What I did was to stick to 11-20 for the ones on the side (the 'leafy' top of the tree) and 1-11 for the middle (hence the long bark). Whereas towards the end I realised that I was meant to just keep cycling through the pattern instead (eg the middle column would go from 1 to 20 and then back to 1). The instructions towards the end also got a bit confusing, where you are decreasing and thus loosing bits of your tree lace/cable, but I have to admit that I forgot what I did there. It definitely had an element of improvisation as I didn't understand the instruction.

At the moment the buttons I have on there are too small so it doesn't look great closed, and I am hoping that the look will improve once I replace them. It does, however, seem to be a little big on the shoulders (it sort of slides down), and I am not entirely sure how to fix this, perhaps picking up fewer stitches for the button band would help? It would also stop it from puckering, which it does at the moment when buttoned up. I think I would also make the sleeves longer if I made it again.

And as another bonus, I have a sewing project to share that I can't be bothered to write a separate post for (now that I am on the roll and all). This is the seamwork Akita top, which came for free with the first issue I subscribed to (although now the seamwork team has decided to let you pick whichever pattern you like every month, which would have been handy last month for me instead of paying for the Astoria). And yes, this top has owls, woo hoo! (or hoot hoot!)

I read lots of people commenting that this is an odd one as it is one giant piece sewn together on the sides, and to be honest, I am not sure it really works, at least not on my frame. It looks quite baggy at the top but then it is too tight around the hips, to the point where I had to make the side slits longer. I also have a sneaky suspicion that I cut it against the grain (still struggling a bit with this), which may explain, first why the owls are sideways, and also how it hangs. But, I have worn it once already and it is quite comfy so I'm not giving up on it.

I also decided to add a little label so that I can tell which is the front and which is the back, which for some weird reason is making me very happy.

Ok, that's it for now, hopefully I won't take ages to write again.