The Christmas knitathon begins - Vanessa headband

Last weekend was London's Knit and Stitch show - if you have never been to one, I thoroughly recommend it, for the atmosphere, bargains and the vast array of yarns that you have probably never heard of before (yarn from camel anyone?). I spent another crazy day walking , being totally overwhelmed by choice despite my promising myself that I would be decisive this year! That plan of course went totally out of the window, and I wandered around for 4 hours, grabbing bargains and luxury delights left and right (as well as the occasional non-craft-related item).


So, like last year, this marked the time to get a start on some Christmas knitting. Although I have decided to make fewer presents this year, I thought it would be good to at least get a few done early to avoid the mad rush in December, and also to lift my knitting spirits, which have been destroyed by my inability to finish the sweetheart sweater (it has not been touched since I last blogged, obviously intarsia is proving to be some sort of nemesis for me).

First, I decided to work on the Vanessa headband, for a friend who wore a very similar one all of last winter - need to give the girl some choice! This headband comes in two widths and has a wide cable running through it that I think makes it look really pretty. It is knitted with bulky yarn and 8mm needles, so a very fast knit indeed, especially if you choose to go for the narrow version.

Apologies for the colour, the sun has left the country

And here is a close up

 The yarn is Mirasol Kutama (naturally bought at the Knit and Stitch show), and I think you will agree is a beautiful bright blue, even if my crappy pictures don't capture the colour very well. It is 100% wool but very soft, and was nice to work with, ie not too unwindy or sheddy. I wish I had bought more of it to be honest as it was a bargain! The narrow version of the headband used around 30g of yarn, so there is a little left that could be potentially combined with some of my numerous scraps to make another headband.

I also made another High-street cap - being such a fast knit and using so little yarn makes it the perfect gift. The yarn here is James Brett Chunky with merino (a brand I have only ever seen at the Knit and Stitch show) and is a very decent wool mix. In fact I bought it last year to make a bow scarf for the recipient, so now she will have a matching hat.

Just as a note, I decided to knit the first pattern repeat with 6mm needles to make sure that the hat sits a little more tightly on the head, switching to 8mm needles for the body. And did an additional pattern repeat, so now it does cover the ears more. I am much happier with this one than the one I made for myself, but I guess this is why it is usually good to experiment with a pattern before making one as a gift!

Healthy chocolate treats

Last month I went on a yoga retreat that was also meant to be a detox weekend. The food was not really detox for me, as it was fairly similar to how I eat at home, bar the lack of cheese and gluten. However, we did have some delicious chocolate balls as dessert one evening; they were yummy and apparently semi-virtuous as they had no sugar and were instead sweetened with dates.  Now, I personally don't like most dry fruit (and dates in particular kind of freak me out, I think they look like bugs!) but it must be the texture rather than the flavour, as in this case the dates are mashed up and give the dark chocolate a lovely sweetness.


I got a rough recipe from the retreat teacher, and then looked all over the internet for something more specific, and today I finally decided to give them a go, by amalgamating bits and pieces from the different recipes I found. (Note that when I say cup, I mean small mug.)

Base recipe:
1 cup of dates
1 cup of ground almonds
2.5 tablespoons of cocoa (I used Green and Blacks)

Place all the ingredients in a blender and blitz until the dates are completely broken down and the mixture has an even consistency. This was one of those occasions when I wished I had a food processor rather than a hand blender, as this made quite the mess in the kitchen. But I promise, it is doable!

I thought it looked a little dry at that point so I added a splash of almond milk, although any liquid would probably do.

To make cocoa-orange chocolate balls, add the zest of half an orange to half the base mixture. Then roll into balls (around one teaspoon of mixture per ball). This will make around 10 cocoa-orange chocolate balls.

To make coconut chocolate balls,  roll the rest of the mixture into balls (again, around one teaspoon of mixture per ball) and roll each ball onto desiccated coconut. As above, this will make around 10 coconut chocolate balls.

These will then need to sit in the fridge for a bit to solidify a little more, and then you can eat them, yay! The texture is almost like raw cookie dough weirdly (kind of soft and cheewy), which is probably another reason I liked them so much. For me, these are sweet enough, although the other half said they could have been sweeter. I guess if you do try them you can experiment a little with the amount of dates added.

Cocoa-orange in the back, coconut in the front. And yes, some are missing!

High street cap

Summer came and went, and as predicted I did zero knitting after finishing the Petrie shell. But with the first chill, I picked up once again the Sweetheart jumper and have now almost finished the back. At this rate, I might be done next summer!

So I needed an instant gratification project to make me a bit more optimistic about finishing projects, and, well, get back into knitting again. When I joined the WI I used one of the vouchers that I got to subscribe to a craft magazine called Mollie Makes, and other than a crochet bow kit I hadn't really delved into any of the projects included. I remember seeing a cool-looking hat (called high street cap), but sadly it was not in one of the issues that I already had. Nevertheless, I figured that $4 isn't really that much, especially for a project that I might make more than once.


It turned out to be the best possible project I could have picked, as it was super-fast, probably took just over two hours! Knit using bulky yarn and 8mm circular needles (the pattern calls for 9mm needles, but I don't have any), the hat is basically an easy to memorize sequence of ribs followed by yarn overs to create an eyelet rib.

I followed the pattern exactly, but it felt a little too short, sitting quite high above my ears, so I finished it with three rows of half-double crochet on the rib to make it a little longer - I think if I were to make it again I would probably do another pattern repeat. Also, it feels a little loose so I would also be tempted to do the first pattern repeat on 7mm or even 6mm needles to make it tighter around the base. The looseness might also be because I blocked it, which I think stretched it out a bit.

As for the yarn, well the only bulky wool I had was the leftover Rowan cocoon from my Lore hoodie, which I had swore not to use ever again as it is super sheddy and annoying because of the mohair. Well, I went back on that, covered myself in tiny hairs as if I had a white cat, and ended up trying to trim the mohair off the top to stop it being so fuzzy. I am certainly never buying this yarn again, despite it being very soft. 

Here it is worn

And here you can see the pattern detail a bit more clearly

Petrie - the final chapter

The saga of the Petrie shell from Knitty is finally over. In case you weren't following, this was a project I started at the end of April as something summery I could finish fairly quickly. Well, it clearly wasn't! Maybe it was the many distractions (conference in Italy, wedding in Greece), maybe it was the endless stockinette... Regardless, this felt like it was never going to be finished.


Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as they say, and there are many many things I would have changed in this pattern - no offence to the pattern designer, but for me several things were plain unnecessary. To be honest I only have myself to blame, if I had read it properly and in full before starting I would have been able to make the changes anyway. So here goes. This is definitely something that can be knitted in the round. I would have just knitted it in the round until the armhole, at which point I would have separated the front and the back and the re-joined at the top with the three-needle bind-off, as written in the pattern. No boring purling and no counting rows to make sure that I have knitted exactly the same on each side (the pattern only specifies inches in length, not rows). And no messy sewing - it took me forever to stitch the two sides together with a kitchener stitch, which I concluded is the only way to do it if you don't want an ugly seam on each side. Oh, and much much fewer ends to weave in, another thing I find absolutely boring.

On the same note, I would not have done the hem, at least not the bottom one. I can see why she designed it that way, but as you may have concluded, I do not like sewing. I sewed both top and bottom hems with the yarn at first, but then when I put the top on the top one was curling down too much and showing the stitching on the inside, so I had to re-do it with some thread to even it out a bit more.

I thought I might add a note here about the wonders of blocking. See the photo below, you will notice how much the stitching is raised in the middle - I was actually quite worried that this unevenness would not go away, but thankfully it did. I actually soaked the top in some water with eucalan (which does not need rinsing), scrunched the water out by rolling in a towel and laid it flat for a couple of days until it dried.  

Before

After

There are still two issues with this top, however. The neck sits quit funny (see photo below) - perhaps I should have blocked it in a different way, but I just can't make it less floppy at the moment. The second is that, as soon as I wore it the bit near my waist creased in a weird way that looks like I have a roll of fat underneath (I swear, I don't!) So perhaps I need to re-block it to sort these issues out. Or just learn to live with them. At least it is not transparent, as I had feared, so can definitely be worn on it own.

Not as good a photo as the previous one. But at least it's finally summer in London!